Learn about human-centered design in this introductory course from Acumen and IDEO

Acumen Academy (supported by IDEO.org and initially from a Gates Foundation grant) offers a hands-on virtual human-centered design training course that is helpful for service-oriented individuals and for teams just getting started with the concepts and tools of human-centered design. Throughout the online course, you’ll be guided through a four-step process for designing breakthrough ideas to address problem-solving for real life challenges your organization may be facing. Learn more about this new course and how to get started below.

Virtual Human-Centered Design Training Course: What to Expect

This course is focused on those that would like to make a positive social impact with design thinking as it’s origins are in the iDE/IDEO Human-Centered Design Toolkit funded by the Gates Foundation that shares many examples of using design thinking to work on problems in the developing world. This free, 9-week course is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the concepts beyond human-centered design – and how to use it to face your own challenges to improve our world. Throughout, you’ll follow a 4-step process to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges, conduct user interviews, and bring ideas to life through rapid prototyping. The online course will include 5 reading guides, 5 workshop guides, and 7 videos featuring IDEO creators and other innovation and design thinking mentors.

You’ll walk through the 4 phases of human-centered design, including:

  • Inspiration
  • Ideation
  • Prototyping
  • Implementation

Expect to experiment with many different activities, including some of our favorites in creating storyboards and rapid pitches. This is a great course to learn how to put activities from the classic HCD toolkit from IDEO into practice for a real challenge your team takes on. Visit their website today to learn about enrolling in the course. This is a legendary course to engage teams in learning the human-centered design process through experiencing it for a real challenge to impact the world!

Need help getting started or want to talk through the human-centered design process for your own challenge with an innovation facilitation expert? Contact Innovation Training today for customized human-centered design workshops, innovation workshops, and design thinking training.

Looking for more innovation and design thinking resources? Check out the following top articles from our blog: