All this week we will be down at Imperial College London contributing to creative design teaching in the civil engineering department. This week is creative design week for second-year undergraduate engineers, one of four such weeks led by Mike Cook of Buro Happold, and Sunday Pipo-Ola from the department.
Our contribution is to help students develop specific design thinking skills that they can practise in the context of this week’s design brief. Our approach is to think of the brain, and indeed the whole body, as a design thinking muscle. Each day we give students specific exercises they can do to give that muscle a workout, to train and strengthen it.
Our workout will cover four aspects of design: research the brief, generating ideas, selecting ideas, and effective team collaboration. At the end of the week, students will be asked to reflect on their experiences of this training, and to commit to their own training regime ahead of the next design week in March.
Throughout the week we will be sharing resources online via Twitter (@ThinkUp_) and LinkedIn, so stay tuned to find out more.