Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire INSITUM, a service design and strategic research firm focused on innovation through a human-centered approach.

Jason Leow has put together a resource called the Public Design Vault. Jason has made something very useful for folks who are working at the intersection of human-centered design, innovation and the public good. Public Design Vault is a curated directory with 500+ design tools & resources for public good, all in one place.

In an ever changing society of the 21st century, there is a demand to equip students with meta competences going beyond cognitive knowledge.

Icebreakers can really help to create the right atmosphere for your design thinking sessions, lighten people up and open them to a fresh approach. They can also help introverts get comfortable with what’s to come. Ice breakers can take lots of forms. Here are some favorites.

Read more...

Mattia Tamborini describes what he did in his Design Bootcamp project. He learned what NGO's lacked in competences and found out some of the challenges they faced, but ultimately helped them to become more effective. What he learned about NGO's will help all NGO's and associations to understand themselves better and make similar improvements.

During Julie Baher's five years at Citrix between 2010 to 2015, she was fortunate to gain first-hand experience leading a transformation in product strategy to a customer-centered approach.

Kevin Henry, an industrial design lecturer has an amazing course on Sketching. Anyone can do it and with his guidance, everyone can improve their understanding of sketching and the techniques that can help you to sketch better. Kevin has a great website Drawing for Product Designers where you can get more information and his book.

Developing environmental sustainability strategies, the Double Diamond method of LCA and design thinking: a case study from aged care. Journal of Cleaner Production, 85, 67-82. Stephen J. Clune*, Simon Lockrey.

Development and testing of a mobile application to support diabetes self-management for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes: a design thinking case study. Numerous mobile applications have been developed to support diabetes-self-management. However, the majority of these applications lack a theoretical foundation and the involvement of people with diabetes during development.

This is a great article by SessionLab reviewing some of the Digitally available tools to help you organize and enable your Design Thinking projects. They do a good job of demonstrating how each tool helps and what stage of the project they are most useful for. Adding some or all of these tools would greatly increase the effectiveness of your Design Thinking Toolkit.