Publication

Design Thinking PMQ

The PMQ Seed – To Open Minds programme is a series of educational projects and activities targeting primary school students. It consists of a teaching team made up of 30+ participants of design professionals, architects, IT experts, performing artists and primary school teachers. HKDI recently hosted a train-the-trainer workshop for the PMQ teaching team, in order to help them better navigate through design education. During the workshop, HKDI continued to emphasise on the importance of empathy, and also introduced its unique E5 design thinking actions.

Empathy is a key element to both education and design. Therefore, participants were highly engaged in action-based activities such as lead user interviews and co-creation exercises. Through these activities, trainees gained a more thorough understanding of endusers’ needs and expectations. Developed by HKDI’s very own Design Thinking Team, the E5 actions is composed of 5 categories: Engage, Envision, Experiment, Evaluate and Enable. During the training workshop, HKDI encouraged interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations, and embraced the exploration of both divergent and convergent actions for user-centred innovations. After the 18-hour workshop, participants could skillfully embed design thinking methodologies into their own programme-planning processes.
The informative and practical workshop came to completion with all participants feeling fruitful, gaining design-thinking and education insights and looking
forward to the commencement of the Seed – To Open Minds programme.