Thomas Wendt



Design Strategy and Research Consultant,
Surrounding Signifiers

Design Thinking is a framework for understanding design processes, the relationship between design and business, and how designers think. It emphasizes empathy building, problem framing, ideation, and validating potential solutions. Through these four phases (and the significant overlap between them), teams are able to learn about users, discover opportunities, solve problems or meet needs, and test their assumptions.

This workshop moves through each of these steps, explaining them through examples and in-class activities. You will perform customer interviews to gather observations, exercise problem framing techniques to find opportunities, sketch potential solutions, and test hypotheses to mitigate risk.

Design thinking stresses the involvement of entire organizations; participants will gain insight on how to spread design-centric ideas throughout their company regardless of the industry. And you don't have to be a designer: all disciplines are encouraged to participate.

None.

Please note there is some content overlap with the User Research Methods workshop. If you have already taken that workshop, please contact us to find out more.

• Obtain a thorough understanding of Design Thinking and its benefits for your organization.


• Work on empathy mapping and lean persona development as ways to explore and communicate hypotheses and research data.


• Learn methods for breaking down problems into their component parts to better understand them.


• Map product stories to better understand their strategic vision.


• Create two different types of rapid prototypes for the purpose of quickly testing ideas and hypotheses.


• Learn how design thinking applies to other industries.

Thomas Wendt

Design Strategy and Research Consultant,
Surrounding Signifiers

Thomas Wendt is a New York City based design strategy and research consultant, educator, speaker, and author.

His book, Design for Dasein, deals with the relationship between experience design and phenomenology (in short, the study of human experience). It argues that the evolution of experience design can benefit from adopting a phenomenological perspective, and similarly, modern phenomenology can benefit from adopting a design perspective.

Client work includes strategic consulting, internal training, and qualitative research projects for companies of all sizes, including American Express, Columbia University, DIRECTV, Capital One, IBM, General Assembly, Smith+Beta, and a number of agencies and startups.

Thomas teaches, writes, and speaks on a variety of topics including philosophy and design, information architecture, lean process and theory, design research, and design thinking.

Presentations have been delivered across the United States, Europe, and the UK. His articles have been published in both academic journals and practitioner publications.