From design education to user-driven innovation and back again

Can distilled design methods for non-designers to user-driven innovation inform design education of Industrial Designers? In 2010 a project on employee driven innovation in the Hospital Sector with Aalborg University and Aalborg Hospital provided 35 participants from all over the hospital with a very condensed ToolKit for user-driven innovation based on Design Thinking. Part of the ToolKit was then used in a course for 3rd semester Industrial Design students to investigate whether these tools also could be used to introduce design students to basic methods. The methods range from observation of potentials and problems to systematic ideation. This paper compares the use these methods in the two settings and especially the problem framing is problematic for both employees and students. For each method strengths and weakness in both situations are outlined. Finally it is concluded that the experiment of taking the tools made for employee-driven innovation back into the education stage without any change and without the full-facilitated support from the project setting shows that introducing tools without the mind-set is challenging the very value of these tools.