Short Programs

Mastering Innovation and Design-Thinking

Date: July 8-10, 2013 | Tuition: $2,150 | Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 1.6
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Course Summary  |  Learning Objectives  |  Who Should Attend  |  Program Outline  |  Schedule  |  Lecturers  |  Location  |  Updates

Course Summary

Insanely successful companies, like Apple, Virgin, Toyota, and others, innovate continuously because of their culture of design-thinking. When done right, this thinking links inspiration and passion to execution and delivery—positively affecting every facet of the product and service.

For you to be successful at work, you need to know how to think like a designer when approaching an engineering task alone, but you especially need design-thinking skills when working within a team or leading a team. By applying a design-centered approach you’ll be able to conceive of radically innovative solutions, deeply understand who your real stakeholders are and what they care about, create vision that gets buy-in from senior management and colleagues, avoid hazards, and create solutions that people love both emotionally and intellectually.

Using a 10-step design process and a 3-step vision creation and communication process, you’ll experience the design process first hand in this interactive class that will expand your thinking and help you and your teams create more powerful solutions. You’ll learn how to create materials that align technical and non-technical audiences, understand the vital importance of the psychology behind how people interact with technology, how to manage creativity, and how to assess the effectiveness of your solutions.

Learning Objectives

The participants of this course will be able to:

1. Understand and apply a 10-Step Design Process
2. Distinguish between incremental innovation and radical innovation when creating new solutions
3. Research and understand the complex network of stakeholders involved in any project
4. Rapidly create and refine a vision for any product or service using a 3-phase approach to align technical and non-technical audiences
5. Understand and use the psychology behind human-machine interface
6. Effectively understand if your end-users will be delighted by your product or service

Who Should Attend

This course is targeted for design engineers, research engineers, project engineers or managers, product engineers, members of the technical staff, applied scientists, and research scientists. The course would also be of interest to those who supervise early career professionals and those in academia (e.g. engineering and science graduate students, and post-docs).

Program Outline

Day One Sessions

• The 10-Step Design Process: an overview of the design process and group exercises
• Innovation & 10 Design Principles: Understanding the origin of innovation, evaluating design principles
• Small Group Design Exercise 1: Interactive design exercise: game design, evaluation of design
• 3-Phase Vision Creation: Learning to articulate design in phases, K-Scripts, State Tables
• Photo Scavenger Hunt: Photos to be presented in class on day 2

Day Two Sessions

• Decision-evaluation and critique: Evaluation exercise, critique techniques
• Small Group Design Exercise 2: K-Scripts creation
• Psychology & Branding: Understanding the social-psychological aspect of interface design and learning to interpret the brand
• Creativity Through Analysis & Open/Closed Thinking : Understanding how to develop innovative ideas through ethnographic research

Day Three Sessions

• Stakeholder Analysis: Understanding how to map the complex network of beneficiaries
• Usability Testing & Wrap-up: Formal methods for usability testing and methods for rapid notation and analysis

Course schedule and registration times

Registration is on Monday morning from 8:00AM - 8:30 AM

Class runs from 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM each day except Wednesday when it ends at 12:00 PM.

• 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM – Session
• 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM – Break
• 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM – Session
• 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM – Lunch
• 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM – Session
• 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM – Break
• 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM – Session

About The Lecturers

Professor Joel Schindall
Co-Director, Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program

Professor Schindall re-joined the MIT faculty in June of 2002 after a 35 year career in the defense, aerospace, and telecommunications industries. His research includes the invention and development of a nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitor which holds the promise of being superior to electrochemical batteries as a means of efficient regenerative electrical energy storage, and he has also supervised research on dynamic simulation and reliability analysis of complex safety-critical systems.

He has co-developed and taught a required senior course in communication skills, including units on conceptual thinking, giving presentations, how to be effective in industry, cross-cultural skills, and engineering ethics, and he is developing a course on engineering design. As co-director of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, Dr. Schindall is actively engaged in a program to enhance, expand, focus, and disseminate the teaching of engineering design and leadership within the MIT School of Engineering.

Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Schindall was VP and Chief Technology Officer of Loral Space and Communications (a manufacturer and operator of commercial satellites), Sr. VP and Chief Engineer for Globalstar (a 48 satellite LEO mobile phone system), and President of Loral Conic (a manufacturer of telemetry systems for missiles and satellites). Dr. Schindall received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1963, 1964, and 1967. During his graduate years he was lecturer and wrote the text for a 140 student introductory electronics course, received an award for excellence in teaching, and was chief engineer for WBCN, a commercial FM radio station.

Blade Kotelly
Lecturer, Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program

For the past nine years, Blade has taught courses on design thinking, first at Tufts University and now at MIT as part of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, where he's been teaching for the past four years. He is a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford University and Harvard University and holds a B.S. in Human-Factors Engineering from Tufts University and an M.S. in Engineering and Management from MIT.

Blade is also the CEO of StorytellingMachines, a Cambridge, MA-based software firm helping everyone make short, high-impact movies. Prior to that, he was the Chief Designer at Endeca Technologies, a search and information access software technology company, where he focused on next-generation Endeca user-experiences.

Blade has worked on the design of a variety of products for the Fortune 500, including search and information access systems, the first clam-shell pagers for Motorola, and hundreds of speech- recognition systems and websites.

Blade also wrote the book on speech-recognition interface design (Addison Wesley, 2003), The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice and his work and thoughts have been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC.

Location

This course takes place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We can also offer this course for groups of employees at your location. Please contact the Short Programs office for further details.