The Design Thinking research group of the Creative Business Research Center focuses on a specific approach to developing solutions to issues: design thinking. It is what designers do to solve problems: create, experiment, explore, creating a flood of ideas. Design thinking is a useful method for innovation and also for today's complex, social issues. In design thinking, different perspectives on the issue are explored, developed and tested as a team: learning by creating. This sounds non-committal, but what are the pitfalls and success factors? What do teams need to achieve results? What role does imagination play in this? The goal of the research group is to further substantiate design thinking as a method and structurally incorporate it into education.
With the research group, we organize living labs around social issues. Led by professor Guido Stompff, students, teachers, researchers and external partners come together to use design thinking to design concrete solutions and investigate them in practice.
Design thinking is ideally suited to tackle complex issues for which an organization alone cannot easily develop a solution. From companies to governments, from social organizations to Research and educational institutions: everyone is welcome to contribute urgent cases and participate in design research projects. Together we work on surprising solutions with social and societal impact. We organize this in the Urban Leisure & Tourism Lab, among other places.
Interested in a collaboration? Send an email to Guido Stompff.
On November 27, 2020, professor Guido Stompff delivered his inaugural lecture 'The power of imagining. Design thinking in teams' in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. You can watch the recording of the livecast here (Dutch spoken) and also download the accompanying publication. Would you like more information? Please send an email to our secretary's office.
Design Thinking aims to give professionals the skills to learn, work and research design thinking. To this end, we focus on individual skills, design thinking in teams and theory development.
Design thinking is a mindset, an approach that people without a design background do not automatically switch to when solving problems. How can you give the professionals of today and tomorrow the skills to do design thinking?
Many social issues are so complex that you need the brainpower of an entire team to solve them. Research focuses on how design thinking processes work best in groups.
What is good design research? How do you set this up? With the professorship, we are working on theorizing design thinking to further substantiate this approach methodologically.
Complex and tough societal issues no one can solve alone. Think of tackling obesity, undermining, off-the-gas and cyber-security. These are issues that often fall outside existing organizational structures and must therefore be viewed from different perspectives. Professor Guido Stompff, together with professors Wina Smeenk, Jürg Thölke and their research teams, designs and researches methods, techniques and tools to deal with such complex social issues on the basis of systemic co-design.
Read more about Expert Network for Systemic Co-design
The Design Thinking Research Group works closely with other colleges and community partners of the CoE for Creative Innovation (CoECI) in Amsterdam and is part of the Network Applied Design Research (NADR) in the Netherlands.
