If you do a web search for design thinking you’ll come across lots of useful resources. We’ve listed some of the resources that we referred to in the development of this workshop.

Policy Lab in a Day – Design thinking is an approach that takes time, in this workshop we attempted a adopt some of the common approaches in condensed period of time.  If you want to try something similar you’ll find the Policy Lab in a Day a handy reference resource.

Open Policy Toolkit – This toolkit from the Policy Lab provides a comprehensive overview of the different methods and tools that you can use in design based thinking approach.  It provides a description of the various tools and how you might apply them and includes links to a number of templates that you can print off or you could take and build on.

This Slideshare presentation also provides a helpful overview of how the Policy Lab works and applies these tools.

DIY Development Impact & You – This toolkit from Nesta includes a range of different tools that can be applied to social innovation.  It features tools such as SWAT analysis, the business model canvas and Edward de Bono’s thinking hats and a series of short use studies describe how these tools have been applied.  You can download a PDF of the toolkit in a range of languages including English, French, Italian, Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish.

Open Change – This Dundee based Design group’s website includes an overview of several design tools that can help you explore problems and solutions.

Open Courses

The Open University have a number of courses linked to thinking on their OpenLearn platform.  These course are open and free of charge, you just need to enrol on OpenLearn and then on individual courses that you’d like to study. The course materials are available in a range of different formats and if you work through all the steps you’ll see that some of the courses will award you an open badge to accredit your learning.

Image credit – Photo by julian mora on Unsplash