These days, people try to design and solve problems by “using” mostly design thinking. However, design thinking is often applied very wrongly and taken out of context. A common example is the Persona. When the Persona is “ready” to use, what do we do with it? Do we put it next to us as the portrait of our beloved one to inspire us and "design" something with it? If we share the Persona with colleagues, would they work with it the same way we would do? Would they accomplish similar implementations as we would, or would they interpret it differently? But wait! Do we as an organization have a clear user segment already? Because if we don´t, instead of working on a Persona, we should work on profiling our target user. These are just a few of the dilemmas encountered while working with Design Thinking for the sake of using a design thinking, without deeper understanding and knowledge around design methods, problem solving and actual design.

Design methods are a series of formalized, sequenced and structured activities popular among designers to accomplish a specific goal. Designers use these methods to help themselves understand problems, visualise situations, explore alternatives and find solutions. When design methods gained popularity in the form of Design Thinking, the critical skills and design reasoning of designers went missing: to discern the most adequate design methods for each specific problem, to jump from one design method to another design method, and to generate, transform and implement information into the final design. Also important: designers use design methods as a means to their work, never as an outcome, end or purpose. Therefore, after applying a design method there is still a lot of work to do until solving a problem.

This Problem-Solving Workshop is a very hands-on training to learn to design and to solve new or constantly changing problems with a methodology structured (or improvised) “on the fly” through the adequate and fitting design methods. The purpose is to learn to construct your very own methodology and design methods on the spur of the moment and to acquire and practice the skill of design-reasoning: to think, communicate, visualize and structure situations like a designer and develop from scratch your own problem-solving design methods.

At this workshop, you will learn the principles of working with design methods towards problem-solving, which includes:
- identifying critical and non-critical problems and defining the objectives you need to reach;
- prioritizing elements as urgent, important and irrelevant;
- identifying the information you have (or lack) to work with through your problem-solving process;
- constructing the most adequate design methodology to accomplish your goal comprising several design methods;
- assembling your own functional design methods;
- transforming and carrying over information from one design method to another;
- making the information from each design method accessible to your colleagues through different specific implementations made by you;
- ensuring and validating that you meet your initial objective.
- reaching a solution to a problem.