Design Thinking: A Hands on Workshop
National Incubation Center’s Karachi chapter has been organizing highly productive and open to public session on business development and on social innovation projects. Around the world, the entrepreneurship is on a historic rise and the story is no different in our context as well.
However, resource deprivation has been an important concern. Previously, there had not been enough avenues to learn important soft skills needed to understand our societal problems and solve them. University education is expensive and independent courses used to come with a hefty price tag. But National Incubation Center, along with other such organization have made it possible that all our bright changemakers get the needed training to be better equipped to make a difference.
Look at the beautiful learning space of NIC in the picture below:
With a similar attempt, NIC recently organized another extremely important workshop on 30th and 31st October 2019 from 10 am to 4 pm. “Design Thinking: A hands on workshop”, was a stand alone initiative, organized with the help of Friedrich Naumann Foundation Pakistan, which teaches people how to create human-centered design solutions. Hence it aimed to introduce start-ups to innovative problem solving techniques.
What is design thinking and why should one be interested in learning it?
Whichever profession you belong to: engineering, medicine, social sciences, graphic designing, and very importantly, business, you need to know exactly the need of the people in order to come up with solutions in your domain of work. Design thinking is a process that helps entities “think out of the box” to solve their product/service problems.
There have been a period in history where all interventions were made based on a top-down approach, where so-called experts and governors used to implement what they thought is best for people. Design thinking, however shifts the process upside down with a bottom-up approach. Experts, businesses and other people who have potential to make change, need to empathize with the problems as understood by people themselves by putting them at the locus of their design.
What did the participants learn in this workshop?
The key takeaways for entrepreneurs are,
- Envisioning successful outcomes as start-up leads
- Defining desired results and market placement
- Low-cost piloting and prototyping
- Continuous feedback analysis and strategic replacements
- Improvised end-product
Who conducted this workshop?
Furqan Qureshi, an expert on thought leadership, coaching, training and business consultation, has had more than 35 years of work experience and excels in bring market practices into the classrooms. These practices include leadership, communication, relationship management, digital transformation and of course, design thinking.
