Overview
This training program helps you leverage methods of design thinking in order to produce new and compelling service and system designs. It serves as a foundation for thinking about the behavioral touchpoints a user may have with your company, and how those touchpoints can be better designed to support a more comprehensive and purposeful brand experience.
The training program's primary emphasis is on diagramming and storytelling. You'll learn to create quick, low-fidelity representations of ideas, so you can test these ideas and improve upon them. By embracing diagramming, storytelling, and rapid prototyping, you'll be prepared to introduce a culture of making into your company or organization. You'll understand how to visualize complex ideas, how to minimize complexity, and how to simply illustrate changes in a complex system.
Grounding Principles
Experience. The experiences people have shape their views and perspectives, and the experiences people have with your brand shape the way they think about, judge, and interact with your company. Experience happens over time, and our curriculum focuses on the development of time-based artifacts that help tell stories of behavior. You'll learn to think about narrative structures, and consider products and services in a larger, experiential context.
Empathy. Often, we look internally at our own company’s processes, attitudes, and perspectives. Empathy means looking outwards, exploring the emotions and perspectives of our users and customers, and trying to see the world through their eyes. Our curriculum emphasizes forms of active empathy: exploring novel situations from a perspective of vulnerability in order to feel what customers feel.
Prototyping. Artifacts ground ideas in reality so that they can be critiqued, examined, and improved. Prototyping is a form of iterative making, in order to see ideas come to life. Prototypes can be collaboratively evaluated, and can be applied to products, services, and systems. Ideas can be developed at a variety of fidelities, and our curriculum emphasizes quick prototyping at rough stages of fidelity, in order to drive rapid improvement.
Skills Developed
You'll learn these practical skills:
Jon is Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design. He was previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, the largest educational software company in the world. He joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused on helping students succeed in college and get jobs. His work focuses on helping design students develop autonomy through making. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and he's most interested in humanizing educational technology.
Jon has previously held positions of Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. He is regularly asked to participate in high-profile conferences and judged design events, including the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, in Mexico, and Malmö University, in Sweden.
Jon is the author of four books: Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design, and Well Designed: How to use Empathy to Create Products People Love, published by Harvard Business Review Press.
