In-person course
in Nottingham Maker & location details

Futures-thinking for creative businesses (weekdays) - Nottingham Trent University

Description

This course is for anyone working in a design, creative or research agency, as well as sole-trading creative entrepreneurs. It’s for those who are keen to expand their skills in creativity and transform the way they design products, services and communications so that they are guaranteed to be human-centred and future-proof. It’ll help you build the essential foundations for delivering effective projects and successful collaborations. Problem-solving and futures-thinking is integral to the creative industries. It goes beyond what makes good design and is about innovation, building capacity and generating new perspectives and big ideas. Within the complexities of today’s fast-changing world with disruption around every corner, having the right methodologies and skillset is essential. This course will therefore teach a design-thinking approach to creative problem-solving towards a future-thinking mindset. It will help you and your colleagues focus on the most critical factors to design - and save money along the way. However, this course will go beyond design and futures-thinking and will also integrate systems-thinking, the lens through which you can look at the world, identify the causes of problem and potential solutions for tomorrow. On this course you’ll follow sessions that include: - an introduction to design-thinking: futures and system-thinking processes and their role in design - design thinking meets futures thinking: working on a live challenge you’ll learn to frame the challenge, look back to look forward (key macro and micro trends) and learn how to make sense from data to produce customer insights - framing the problem: based on insights, you’ll build a clearer picture of the challenge and reframe it to ensure you are focussed - develop and deliver: you’ll explore different ways of answering your challenge, experience various idea generation techniques and get started with prototyping and testing early-stage concepts - bridging learnings and practice: there’ll be an opportunity to reflect and experiment with new ways of working within your design practice. The course will be a combination of lectures, discussions and informal learning spaces that allow for exploration, discussion, critique and shared learning. Slides, templates and workbooks will be available to download after the course for future reference. What will I gain? By the end of the course, you will have a valuable understanding of the importance of taking a holistic approach to design-thinking, futures-thinking and systems-thinking. You’ll have a series of tools and processes that you can apply to your own work to increase your creative capabilities. The blend of theory with pragmatic tools with the emphasis on actionability will ensure your next creative challenge is a success. Level: Intermediate / Professional Entry requirement: You should have experience of working in a creative environment, but no formal qualifications in design are required. Tutor profile: Yvonne Richardson is a creativity strategist and educator with over 20 years’ of innovation experience. A creativity provocateur and critical thinker, her training courses draw from her background in psychology, strategic marketing and brand-building. Yvonne has hopped across companies, freelancing gigs, hit burnout (and bounced back), took a sabbatical, moved into academia, launched an idea and evolved it into a business… and made plenty of mistakes along the way. Basically, she has been at both the creative coalface and led others through creative process. With a degree in psychology and postgraduate diploma in applied psychology, Yvonne is currently a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University in the School of Art and Design where she is the subject expert on creativity, innovation and consumer psychology.