Service Innovation & Design
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I Came In Oblivious. I Left With Something Worth It.
By Aditya Rai I walked into Prof. Katja Tschimmel’s masterclass on 4 September not knowing what to expect. Design thinking was a phrase I’d heard, not something I understood. I left with something worth it, and something I needed. Walking in Blind The session got practical fast. Paired with random classmates, we interviewed each other…
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From Tools to Confidence – Learning Design Thinking by Doing It Together
We started the course with different ideas about Design Thinking and ended with a much broader understanding of it. Through hands-on exercises, teamwork and reflection, we learned how empathy, experimentation and collaboration can turn uncertainty into learning, ideas and new possibilities.
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Does AI Make Us More Creative or Just Faster?
Written by Iryna Ilyuchyk & Tanjid Hossain During our Design Thinking workshop, Katja Tschimmel introduced the idea of Design Thinking 4.0, where humans and AI work together in the creative process. We agreed not to use AI during ideation. We first explored the problem and generated ideas ourselves, while AI was allowed later, during prototyping.…
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How Might We Give a Busy Father His Week Back? Design Thinking Changed the Question.
By Asad Hussain and Anu Maharjan. We arrived at Katja Tschimmel’s two-day masterclass expecting a toolkit. We left with a reframed problem, a paper map covered in Lego, and a clearer answer to why design thinking can survive in organisations where other innovation methods quietly die.
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From Shared Experiences to an App: Our Design Thinking Journey
By Michael Sylvia and Laxmi Khatri Shrestha It began with storytelling and listening(Empathy) In our first group exercise, Katja Tschimmel showed us how universal questions created common ground among diverse people from all over the world. We learned about each other and where we started on our paths that led to Espoo. Each question told…
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From Ideas to Action: What Design Thinking Taught Us
Written by: Saroj Shrestha Mengyun Xu Our first two days of Design Thinking were intensive, practical, and sometimes surprising. Before the sessions, we mainly understood innovation as creating something new. By the end of the second day, we realized that our understanding had already started to change. Innovation is also about understanding people, finding the…
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From Tools to Mindset: What Two Days of Design Thinking Taught Us
Written by: Md Shanaullah Shihab & Pratiksha Ghimire Design Thinking | Reflection | Learning The contact sessions on 4–5 September gave us an opportunity to look at Design Thinking (DT) not simply as a collection of tools, but as a different way of understanding and approaching challenges. The discussions, learning activities, and reflections helped us…
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Shifting Together: How we learned to reframe problems in 2 days
by Andreia Pais da Cunha & Sayef Md Uddin We usually associate Design Thinking with sticky notes and frenetic brainstorming, but our two‑day course with Katja Tschimmel showed us it is a deliberate mindset. It helps us reframe situations, look at problems from different angles, and explore possibilities we don’t see at first or never,…
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What Do Groceries and Shoes Have to Do with Design Thinking?
Written by: Olukayode Adebiyi & Kirsti Earl Our design thinking journey began from different perspectives. During Laurea’s second-phase admission process, we took part in a group discussion about how artificial intelligence is shaping our world. Kirsti saw many possibilities in AI while also noting that how we use it matters. Olukayode was more cautious about…
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From Idea to Prototype: How AI Supported Innovation During a Hackathon
Introduction A hackathon is a time-bound, collaborative event where people gather to rapidly develop solutions to a defined problem (Briscoe & Mulligan, 2014). Originally a mostly tech-oriented format, hackathons have expanded beyond the technology sector and are now widely applied across many fields, including education, healthcare, and social innovation. What was once a space for…
