Design thinking applied to hackathons
Get teams to collaborate, ideate, prototype, and craft innovative solutions. Empower your team with design thinking mastery, lifting creativity and driving impactful change.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a repertoire of approaches boosting the idea-generation process and enhancing successful innovation.
It embraces the acknowledgement of conflicting constraints:
✦Feasibility, which pertains to what technology allows.
✦Viability, encompassing what aligns with business objectives.
✦Desirability, which focuses on what resonates with people and human values.
When a harmonious equilibrium is struck among these elements, genuine innovation happens. The generated ideas will be implementable, tangible, and practical.
Design thinking hackathon process
Empathise
In the first phase, the hackathon participants will leverage tools to empathise with the stakeholders’ points of view. They could be asked to conduct interviews, surveys, or observations to gain insights. This will be a “divergent” experience
Define
It’s the moment to select the problem to be solved and understand the stakeholders’ pain points and frustrations. This phase is typically convergent.
Ideate and prototype
Eureka time: participants will brainstorm all the possible features of the solution through reiteration cycles. They will also check its technical feasibility. This is when the idea comes to light.
Test and validate
In the last phase, participants analyse what resources are needed to make it a reality and how economically viable it is. They define what value proposition the idea is offering and finally validate the whole idea.