The Course for Human-Centered Design

Class 5: Workshop Guide

The Class 5 Workshop can be completed over the course of just one week. Activity 02 will help
your team understand what you’d need to think about if you were to bring your solution to
market. This course is after all just a learning experience, so you’re not expected to actually
implement. Although, if you’re following a personal design challenge, your team might explore
this option. The second half of the workshop is a chance to reflect on the process and then share
what you’ve created!

Class Leader’s Guide

In the Class 4 Workshop, you tested your prototypes in the community and received feedback.
Typically this would lead to several rounds of iteration, but for this class you’ll just take a
moment in Activity 01 to reflect on what your team would change and then move forward in
thinking about implementation. At the end of this workshop, your team will take some time to
share your solution with the greater course community. First, come to an agreement as a group
and decide how much time to dedicate to your Assignment 4 submission. You’ll want to be sure
to save enough time in the Workshop for your reflection and moving forward conversations.

Before The Class 5 Workshop

Confirm That You Have A Meeting Space

This space should have ample wall or table space where you can post ideas.

Print Out Class 5 Workshop Guide

To save paper, it is not required to print the Class 5 Readings. Check with your team members
and encourage them to print the Class 5 Workshop Guide.

Coordinate With Your Team To Bring Supplies

A notebook for blank paper, pens, felt markers or Sharpies, Post-it notes (or their equivalent),
and printed Class 5 Workshop Guide should be sufficient.

Lead The Workshop

This guide will walk you through facilitating the activities, discussions and assignments for Class
5. You will also want to keep track of time so that your group makes it through the full workshop
in approximately two and a half hours. Make sure to read the Class 5 Readings thoroughly so
that you can effectively lead your team this class.
01 Questions, Comments & Takeaways
Precrafted design challenge—10 minutes // Personal design challenge—30 minutes

Congratulations! You’ve completed your Class 4 Ideation phase activities and turned your
opportunities for design into real life concepts! You’ve also learned about the last phase of the
design process as part of the Class 5 Implementation phase Readings. This Activity 01 is a way
for you to reflect on your experiences, ask questions, and discuss what iterations you would
make if you were taking this idea forward. Take a few minutes to reflect on the questions below.
Then discuss what you are most excited about or interested in with your group.

1) What would you most like to discuss with the group about your experiences during your
Class 4 Ideation phase workshop? What was most surprising? What was the hardest part
for you? What were your “aha moments”? Discuss the iterations you would make on your
idea and what learnings led to these new iterations.

2) Did anyone check out what other teams were doing on the Online Community? Would
you like to share something inspiring you saw? Did you learn anything interesting from
other teams around the world tackling your same challenge?

3) What were your big takeaways from the Class 5 Implementation Readings? Do you have
questions?
02 Create an Action Plan
Precrafted design challenge—30 minutes // Personal design challenge—1+ hours

Typically, your design team would create an action plan while in the room with key partners and
stakeholders, requiring more lengthy discussion and collaboration. For this Class 5 Activity 02,
however, let’s get some practice making an action plan just with your team. Spend some time
discussing with your team which type of staff members, partners, and funders you would need to
get on board to make your idea happen.

Staff
• What core skills do you need on your team to successfully implement?
• Do you need a project manager to coordinate your growing team?
• What support staff will help your idea to get off the ground?

Partnerships
• What types of partners will you need to support your implementation?
• Are they funding or capacity partners? If capacity, what do they contribute (i.e. web
development, telecommunications, a distribution network)?

Funding
• Will you apply for grants or fundraise to get your idea off the ground?
• Will you continue to need this type of funding as your idea scales or will you shift to a
sustainable revenue model?
• When do you need to break even?
03 Create a Pitch
Precrafted design challenge—30 minutes // Personal design challenge—1+ hours

When bringing your solution to market, you’ll need to get very used to talking about your idea.
The more you tell the story of your potential solution, the more likely you are to get funders,
partners, staff members, and most importantly the people you’re design for on board to support
your work. First, work as a team to create a pitch for your solution. Then take turns each
practicing your pitch in front of the group and receiving feedback from the rest of your team
members. If you’re pursuing a personal design challenge, consider drafting multiple pitches for
different types of listeners—what you say to a potential user of your product or service is likely
different from how you would sell your idea to a potential funder.

EXAMPLE

Succinctly, what is your project?

Asili is a sustainable social business designed to reduce under-five mortality in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. It offers clean water, a health clinic, and agricultural services.

Who do you need to pitch?

Funders

What format(s) will your pitch take?

A video to convey the vision

A presentation that we can make to possible funders

What’s your short pitch? As you write it, think about how you’ll expand it into a longer one.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 20% of children don’t live to see their fifth birthdays.
Asili, a new sustainable social enterprise from the American Refugee Committee and IDEO.org,
is changing al l that. By designing a holistic new approach to health care, food, clean water, and
agriculture with the people of the DRC themselves, Asili is ensuring that more kids than ever get
the right start.
03 Create a Pitch
Precrafted design challenge—30 minutes // Personal design challenge—1+ hours

Answer the following questions:

Succinctly, what is your project?

Who do you need to pitch?

What format(s) will your pitch take?

What’s your short pitch? As you write it, think about how you’ll expand it into a larger one

TIPS ON DRAFTING A GOOD PITCH

• Concentrate on the main thrust of your idea, why it’s different, and any call to action
you’re making.
• Try to succinctly explain it in less than a minute.
• Be clear and unambiguous. Don’t get bogged down in the details!
• Get creative with your storytelling format—it could be a pamphlet, website, book, or
presentation.
04 Share Your Solution
Congratulations on completing Class 5—your solution is that much closer to being ready for the
real world!

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on how far you’ve come. From the original design
challenge, you’ve gone out into the community to hear about and see the issue first hand from
the people you’re designing for; you’ve organized and synthesized everything you learned into
actionable opportunities for design; you’ve generated lots of ideas for possible solutions; you’ve
brought a small handful of those solutions to life through rapid prototyping; and then you’ve
even put the time and thought into how you would introduce that final solution into a real-world
context. That’s quite a feat for seven weeks. Good job!

We would hate for all of those solutions to just end right there. So now for the fun part. You get
to share your solution with the rest of the course community!

There are over 15,000 other registered course takers who have been working alongside you the
past several weeks, and the power of this course comes from being able to share learnings,
feedback, and excitement with the broader community. Take some time as a group to find the
right way to share your solution in whatever way appeals most to your team. This could be a
deck, a powerpoint presentation, a video, or anything else you can imagine that helps
communicate your idea to the broader community.

We recommend dedicating around an hour to putting together your Assignment 4 submission.

However, if your team is interested in creating something a bit more elaborate, make sure you’re
in agreement with the rest of your team on how much time you’d like to allot for this activity.
Don’t worry, the deadline for Assignment 4 is a soft deadline, and we’ve built in some extra time
following the end course date to catch up on assignments, so you have time to get creative if you
so choose!

Please see the Assignments page for further instructions on how to submit and share your
solution.
05 Reflect
Precrafted design challenge—30 minutes // Personal design challenge—1+ hours

As part of the Class 5 Readings, you evaluated what you liked or didn’t like about working
together as a design team, this course, and the human-centered design process overall. Use the
worksheets you filled out during the Class 5 Readings as a starting point for this group
discussion.

Discuss

Team Dynamics
• What was it like to work as a design team? Did you like working together?
• What was the most inspiring moment for your team?
• What was the most frustrating?
• Were there moments of conflict or disagreement? How did your team reach a resolution?

The Course
• What were the most successful aspects of the course?
• What were its weakest parts?
• Imagine we received a grant from a very generous donor to improve the course. Could
you give us three suggestions about where to start?

You!
Members of your team likely felt more comfortable during some parts of the human-centered
design process than others. This is entirely normal and one of the reasons that having an
interdisciplinary design team is so important. Think back over the course.

• Which areas felt most natural for members of your team? Was it the Inspiration phase?
Ideation? Implementation?
• Where did members of the team struggle? Why?
• Were there skill sets that were missing from your team? What were they?
• If you could draft a new member to your team for your next design challenge, what key
skills would they possess?
06 Moving Forward

Good work! Your team has successfully completed the human-centered design process. If you
brought beverages to this final workshop, give yourselves a toast. You learned a lot and
hopefully made some great progress toward designing an innovative solution to the challenge
your team took on.

So what’s next? Armed with this new human centered design approach, your options are almost
unlimited. We do, however, want to give you a few immediate action steps to choose from. Talk
through the options we’ve highlighted on the following page and discuss whether any of them
make sense for your team to pursue as a group. Alternatively, you might wish to pursue some of
these options individually.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about human centered design. Have fun out there!

1) Move Forward with the Design Challenge Your Team Has Been Working On Since
Class 2.
Just because this course is ending doesn’t mean that your great work on this design
challenge has to end. Could you team up with other human-centered designers in your area?
Perhaps you can collaborate remotely via the Online Community?

2) Frame a New Design Challenge.

As you’ve heard throughout this course, human-centered design is all about practice,
practice, practice. Take a look at the Frame Your Own Design Challenge materials provided
in Class 5 on the course platform, scope a new design challenge, and take this new challenge
as a chance to put your new skills to work. Spread the word of your new challenge to
existing teammates, the Online Community, or some colleagues to assemble a design team
and get started. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

3) Share Your Ideas, Final Prototype, and New Challenges During an In-Person Meetup.
Consider organizing your own meetup. Use the Forum topics on the course platform to find
other like-minded individuals and connect with them in person. And if an in-person meetup
just isn’t practical, be sure to share as much as possible with the Online Community

4) Moving a Bit Slower?

Perhaps you’re not quite sure what challenge you’d like to tackle next, but you care deeply
about a certain topic area. Clean drinking water? Girls’ education? Mobile technology? With
thousands of coursemates represented on the Online Community, you’re sure to find other
human-centered designers who care passionately about the same social issues as you. And if
you haven’t done so already, we urge you to visit Design Kit, a learning platform and
community of over 70,000 members using human-centered design to tackle social sector
challenges around the world. Then, join the discussion or post opportunities on the Design
Kit LinkedIn group.