Every semester, the Innovation Space at HNU hosts a variety of courses in which students develop exciting questions using design thinking. On February 7, the Innovation Space opened its doors to students: For the first time, the Lessing Gymnasium in Neu-Ulm visited. The 18 participants from the upper school worked together in teams of two to develop the wallet of the future. There were no limits to their creativity: The ideas ranged from an implanted chip with an app to a large money counting machine. By means of a quick prototype that the students had built from various materials such as plasticine, Lego and paper, the idea became a bit of a reality. In the end, the students confidently pitched their idea to the entire class. The labor-intensive workshop was rounded off with a subsequent tour of the entire university campus.
The "Wallet Project": Design thinking on the fly
The Wallet Challenge is a completely predefined workshop concept developed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design that is designed to introduce participants to the Design Thinking method in a condensed form. All relevant process steps are tested in a quick run-through. Thus, in the first step, the participants have to understand the problem and the users of the purse, define the core problem and the final starting position, generate ideas and design proposals, and finally build a prototype and test it. The whole process takes no more than an hour. A Wallet Challenge is tightly timed and comes with minimal instructions from the facilitating person.
More workshops planned in the future
The high school students, faculty and even Professor Patricia Franzreb found the little outing enlightening and fun. Further school workshops in Innovation Space are planned for the future.
Contact
Prof. Patricia Franzreb
