The Reach Network of professionals in design and innovation has brought its seasoned practitioners from around the world together to create 5 masterclasses on the This Is Doing learning platform in the Autumn of 2020.
Most of us have more than a decade, some several decades, of experience in Human Centred Design or related innovation practices. Learning has always been a key driver in our careers, in particular learning with others, which can be clients, colleagues or peers. At this moment in time we feel that learning is even more important than ever since we are faced with crises that affect everything, from our personal lives to the entire planet and everything in between.
Many of us are not facing their first crisis though, having gone through the financial crisis in the first decade of this century, and even the dotcom crisis at the turn of the century. The current health and environmental crisis does ring a few familiar bells and one is that the need for innovation and change is larger than ever.
How to apply our skills as professionals in this context, is what we will focus on in the master classes that we have set up. There are 5 directions that we will explore: research, care, work, planet and business. Each class is independent and can be attended as a one-off 3.5 hours online course.
The content of our Master Classes is focussed as much on methods as on purposes. The methods we will discuss build on many years of experience in design and innovation projects in East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. The purposes we have set ourselves over the years, and set together with our clients, often relate to improving work for people, bringing more attention to care as a force of change, and more-than-human design that considers the limits of our planet. Across work, care and planet as main themes, we will address methods to create change in personal, social and business domains. The holistic approaches we take, in the tradition of human centred design, do demonstrate that the personal, the social and business are connected in many ways.
The five master classes are:
- Deep Dive Design Research (28 Oct 2020): Creating knowledge is crucial in change and innovation processes and your research will have to deliver that knowledge. Do you know about design research and do you use it in your projects and teams but would you like to go deeper on its methods, processes and applications? This masterclass will help you to get more out of your design research.
- From Human Centred Design to Life Centred Design (4 Nov 2020): From cradle-to-cradle to sustainable design to circular design to frugal innovation and jugaad: all of these approaches to design and innovation inspired this masterclass. Here, we no longer take humans as the only reference in our work, and include the ecosystems that sustain us too.
- Creating Caring and Meaningful Organisational Cultures (11 Nov 2020): COVID19 shows us once more the importance of care in our societies. Appreciation and recognition of care has grown now. But how can we use this to determine the new care practices that have sprung up, and bring them into our current projects and our organisations?
- Applying HCD to build and learn from resilient communities (18 Nov 2020): How can people organise themselves around societal problems? This masterclass focuses on HCD-driven practices that unlock the potential in communities around the world to create solutions themselves through co-creation.
- Doing Business Innovation: Creative, Collaborative and Customer-Centric (25 Nov 2020): Business innovation is multidisciplinary by nature. Strategy, research, product & service management, marketing, communication, implementation, change processes, and more, can be pulled together by mastering creativity, collaboration and customer-centricity however, as this class will show.
All of our masterclasses are about learning through reflection on what we do. They are not lectures, they are structured conversations with peers. Each class is taught by at least two different practitioners, some even by four, offering perspectives from at least two countries and mostly several continents.
We have all learned important lessons over many years of practice and pioneering, and we will use our own practice and projects as examples throughout to illustrate and underpin these lessons.
But your own practice or projects will be part of the material we work with in the masterclasses too. We will look at your work as much as ours, to see where we can apply lessons learned. This will leave you at the end of each individual masterclass with new ideas to try out in your own work, and a certificate on top.
Do join us on this journey, we would love to have you involved!