Design Thinking Fundamentals A

Academic unit or major

Graduate major in Engineering Sciences and Design

Instructor(s)

Shigeki Saito / Hiraku Sakamoto / Kazuaki Inaba / Wataru Hijikata / Momoko Nakatani / Yuki Taoka / Masanori Kado / Yuval Kahlon

Class Format

Lecture/Exercise (Face-to-face)

Media-enhanced courses

-

Day of week/Period
(Classrooms)

5-8 Mon

Class

A

Course Code

ESD.A402

Number of credits

110

Course offered

2025

Offered quarter

1Q

Syllabus updated

Mar 19, 2025

Language

English

Syllabus

Course overview and goals

This class provides students an opportunity to learn the knowledge and the capability needed in "Design Thinking" approach through intensive lectures and practices of a team project. The class starts with the question, "What is Design Thinking?". The students are requested to understand and master the "Design Thinking" approach about how to find and solve the problem from the fundamental level. The knowledge and skill obtained in this class is highly related to the following Engineering Design projects. When engineers faces various problems, they must know how to solve them with strong viewpoint of key issues in problems. Therefore, students in this class learn fundamental five steps; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, and understand how to use these steps through basic exercises. They also experience the iterating processes from "finding potential user needs" to "ideating as prototyping solutions to problems".

Course description and aims

The goal is to understand fundamental five steps of "Design Thinking" approach; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, through lectures and practices of a team project.

Keywords

Design Thinking, Project-Based-Learning (PBL)

Competencies

• Specialist skills
• Intercultural skills
• Communication skills
• Critical thinking skills
• Practical and/or problem-solving skills

Class flow

All lectures are to be held at workshop spaces, such as Design Factory, Ishikawadai 5th bldg., 3rd floor.
Students are supposed to have a group work under instructors' supervision. The class style is Project-Based-Learning (PBL).
In this lecture, lectures are given mainly in English (though Japanese usage is accepted in group discussions).

Course schedule/Objectives

Study advice (preparation and review)

To enhance effective learning, students are encouraged to spend approximately 100 minutes preparing for class and another 100 minutes reviewing class content afterwards (including assignments) for each class.
They should do so by referring to textbooks and other course material.

Textbook(s)

Each instructor specifies textbooks.

Reference books, course materials, etc.

Each instructor specifies materials.

Evaluation methods and criteria

Interviews & meetings during lectures (30%), team presentations (30%), reports (25%), and contributions to the team (15%)

Related courses

• ESD.B401 ： Engineering Design Advanced
• ESD.B402 ： Engineering Design Project

Prerequisites

Each instructor specifies requirements for her/his class.

Other

The workshop space in Ishikawadai Bldg. No. 5 3rd Floor Design Factory will be used.

This lecture restricts the number of students based on the maximum number of project groups. The enrollment of the following students will be preferentially accepted. If there are too many participants, selection such as interviews is carried out.
(i) Students in Engineering and Science Design Graduate Major.
(ii) Students who are willing to practice "empathizing with users through producing prototypes" and "overcoming the diversity of students with different backgrounds." These are evaluated by enrollment experiences of the related courses and interviews with the instructors.