Design thinking, the driver of innovation in Irish Industry: An interview with Denis Hayes, Managing Director of the IRDG

non-peer-reviewedGovernment has awoken to the power of design for business, large, medium and small. The country has made great progress from 1960’s Ireland, when the government last played a significant role in the design sector. Today, design has achieved strategic importance. It is now recognised as a key enabler of innovation, an effective agent for organisational change and a process for delivering positive customer experience. The government of 2018 recognise design on par with STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and has more recently written it into future policy ambitions with the 2017 publication, ‘Winning by Design’. In this interview, Martin Ryan and Trevor Vaugh step outside the design community for an external perspective offered by a pillar of Irish industry, Denis Hayes - MD of IRDG (Industry Research & Development Group). Representing a network of over 250 companies involved in Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I) across all industry sectors, the IRDG are an important part of the current and future industry growth and ambition and provide a litmus test for the progress of design thinking in industry

Designing the Transition to Higher Education for Students from Under-Represented Groups

Universities are increasingly seeking to open access routes and identify ways of encouraging under-represented groups to consider higher education as an option. This cohort of students often have distinct challenges associated with disability, maturity and socioeconomic disadvantage. Maynooth University, through the Maynooth University access programme (MAP) and the Launchpad Orientation Programme (Launchpad), has proven successful in supporting these groups, helping them transition into and through higher education. Unfortunately the challenges associated with under-represented groups can lead to increased, often unarticulated difficulties, resulting in greater reliance on services and higher dropout rates compared to the average student. We discuss here a pilot study exploring the use of the design process to act as an agent of transition for MAP students entering 3rd level education. Learning was achieved through a multi-session, action based programme, where MAP students and staff, together with the University’s department of design Innovation, worked together to co-understand and co-design the transition. The pilot was a success both in terms of student engagement and future programme improvement. For students, the design workshops enabled valuable sharing of experiences and allowed them to contribute their ideas based on defined problems. For MAP staff, the research data collected provided actionable insights into the unarticulated needs and experience of students, reframed their understanding of the problems and provided new tools and collateral for further use

Socially Distanced Higher Education: Redesigning Progress

The social distancing measures developed as an attempt to control the Covid-19 outbreak have had a major, long lasting effect on every aspect of society. Higher Education was dramatically affected by these social distancing measures, leading to the closure of campuses around the globe and the move to continue facilitating student learning online. In order to develop a Higher Education system in a future where the results of Covid-19 will be long lasting in our society, we require insight into the priorities of the Higher Education Institution as a whole. Here, we present a small sample of staff and student experiences of teaching and learning during the Covid-19 lockdown. Through their experiences, we see that the Higher Education Institution continued to ensure functional progress of students and staff during the lockdown; however, other equally important forms of progress were not prioritised. We argue that as we move into the future of Higher Education, it is vital that any changes made to the system take into account the ability for students to make functional, social and emotional progress through their studies

The potential of Design Thinking to enable change in Higher Education

Over the past decade, design thinking had gained increasing attention from practitioners and academics from across many sectors and disciplines for its ability to foster innovation and tackle complex challenges. The approach has been defined as a “human-centered approach to innovation that puts the observation and discovery of often highly nuanced, even tacit, human needs right at the forefront of the innovation process” (Gruber et al., 2015). While there is increasing evidence that design thinking delivers value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen (Liedtka, 2018), there is little evidence that Higher Education has embraced the approach to the same extent as many other public, private and 3rd sector organisations. Prior to the emergence of Covid-19 and the restrictions and disruption it brought about, Higher Education was facing many challenges. Now, as we begin to return to campuses, there is a growing pressure on institutions to respond, innovate and transform in order to tackle the growing list of new and existing operational challenges, the imminent threat of disruption and to meet the explicit and unarticulated needs of its staff and students. In this article we argue that design thinking could offer an inclusive approach to innovation and transformation, one that institutions can utilise to begin to address these complex challenges, improve stagnant processes and ensure sustainability over time. Change can only happen if institutions are able to motivate, build creative confidence and give permission to staff and students to take action. We argue that they need empower staff with the skills, attitudes and abilities necessary to identify and tackle challenges, and move into an uncertain space where the core skills and mindsets of design thinking : empathy, humility, creativity, experimentation and a bias towards action offer the opportunity to design that change. We suggest a set of design principles that could help begin this process

Participatory mechanisms for reviewing and redesigning curricula with students

Research from a range of sectors indicates the benefits of enabling user participation in service design. In universities, however, questions remain about the usual mechanisms used to obtain student feedback in relation to the quality and utility of the data obtained, the extent to which students participate in feedback processes or experience these as meaningful, and whether academics are willing to revise their teaching based on feedback. This project piloted participatory mechanisms of involving students in the review and redesign of a module. It used processes from the fields of restorative practice and design thinking to enable dialogue and partnership between students and the lecturer on an undergraduate module, LW380 Victimology, after its initial delivery. It was found that restorative and design processes were attractive to students as methods of providing feedback. It enabled them to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the module and teaching approach in a sophisticated manner, and to participate in co-creating practical and transferrable ways to meet future students’ needs. The benefits for the lecturer were vast, supporting their efforts to design educational and supportive materials and activities, to empathise with students, and to reflect on their teaching practices, as well as opening new avenues for pedagogical learning

How Irish design consultancies align with Ireland’s Innovation 2020 priorities: a preliminary study

peer-reviewedThe Government of Ireland has positioned design as integral to the innovation landscape. In particular, it encourages innovations from designers that align with six thematic areas identified in the Innovation 2020 report. Those areas are health & medical, information & technology communications (ITC), food, energy, manufacturing & materials and service & business processes. However, research is yet to show the current contribution of design consultancies and their project outcomes categorised within these six priority thematic areas. This paper presents empirical findings on a review of 571 projects advertised on the websites of 26 design consultancies in Ireland. It shows that just under half of the reviewed design projects fall within the thematic project areas. Furthermore, this paper shows the differences between three design disciplines (product design, user-experience design and branding design) and their contribution of projects to each thematic area. The results of this empirical study are relevant and of use to design practitioners, clients and policy makers. For designers, this research identifies opportunities for new business and innovation within the Government of Ireland key thematic areas. For design clients, this research offers opportunities to seek input from relevant design disciplines according to the thematic alignment of their project. For policy makers, this research offers context of the six key thematic areas within the design disciplines in Ireland. Lastly, the results of this research suggest that across the disciplines of product, user-experience and branding design, preferred priority themes are evident

The History of Personal Protection Equipment

€28 million worth of personal protection equipment such as masks, gloves and goggles are due to arrive in Ireland tomorrow. It comes as healthcare workers complained about the shortage of protective equipment in our hospitals. Trevor Vaugh, from Maynooth University explains the origins of such products

The History of Personal Protection Equipment

€28 million worth of personal protection equipment such as masks, gloves and goggles are due to arrive in Ireland tomorrow. It comes as healthcare workers complained about the shortage of protective equipment in our hospitals. Trevor Vaugh, from Maynooth University explains the origins of such products

The History of Personal Protection Equipment

€28 million worth of personal protection equipment such as masks, gloves and goggles are due to arrive in Ireland tomorrow. It comes as healthcare workers complained about the shortage of protective equipment in our hospitals. Trevor Vaugh, from Maynooth University explains the origins of such products

Getting the right design or getting the design right; An observation of 18 projects progressing through a structured design thinking process

Design thinking is firmly established as a key driver of tomorrow's innovations (Martin 2009). Poised as a cure for delinquent services and estranged technologies, design thinking promises to reintegrate the user and embellish commercial offerings in positive experience. More often, this means ‘design as add-on’, a refinement step situated at the ‘back end’ of innovation processes and employed only after strategic decisions have been made. This practice is enforced by empirical research dominated by new product development theories for effective project management. In this paper we re-address this imbalance by investigating its potential at the conception of new innovation directions, as a strategic front-end driver. Importantly, there are advocates of design thinking who promote its ability to find ‘the right design’ over its ability to ‘get the design right’ (Buxton, 2010). Expert design thinking is charged at the cold face of many innovation initiatives recognised for its ability to uncover new relevant opportunities but limited to anecdotal evidence, or one off celebrated examples. Design thinking literature contributes rich understanding of process sequencing (Lindberg et al., 2010) but makes limited contribution to phase implementation. It is mostly left open to interpretation and subjective preferences by its proponents. While this flexibility may be a virtue in expert hands, in the wrong hands it is at best a missed opportunity and worst an expensive fiasco. We have conducted a 12 week field trial of design thinking with 18 participants in 18 organisations. We surveyed all participants and coded the resulting data. We found 2 stand-out patterns that have implications for effective design thinking integration in organisations; 1) position of the designer relative to the organisations and 2), emphasis of design thinking tools if earlier or later in the process. Drawing on our extensive experience in teaching and practice we offer new insights to support design thinking purposed towards the front end of innovation and finding the ‘right design’. In this paper we integrate wider literature from insight (Klein & Jarosz, 2011) and cognition theories with design thinking theory and build a theoretical model to support this application