Good For: Challenge assumptions

Here you find a selection of the Danish Design Centre’s commonly used tools. It includes information about the methods, instructions for tool use, and printable materials. The tools are divided in three categories that are used at different stages in the design process - and often in this order: Explore, Co-create, and Give the future concrete form. Explore helps the participants to open up and get around all aspects of the issue. Co-create contains tools that help participants get in-depth…

Features: Facilitators guide

This playbook is an online crash course on service design. It works alongside the 14 points set out in the Digital Service Standard to provide the basics needed to get started on a digital service. It covers: About service design, Discovery phase, Alpha phase, Beta phase, Live phase, and Team roles

Features: Glossary, Techniques

This website and blog containing a toolkit based on the book GameStorming (not free) and intends to bring a playful or game-like atmosphere to group problem solving activities for the purpose of creating an mindset conducive to innovation and change-making. The site contains games for different purposes, including vision and strategy, planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. The online resources describe each method and technique in terms of: Object of Play, Number of Players, Duration of…

Features: Facilitators guide, Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

A tool that organizations can use to assess, map and transform their cultures. It is intended at a group activity to guide conversations around outcomes, behaviours, and enablers/blockers. The website also contains guidance for its use. It is intended for a private sector context but non-financial "outcomes" can also be considered when using it in the public sector.

Features: Techniques, Tips&Tricks

The guide offers practical guidance to local government officials on how to build a culture and practice of innovation and give local leaders an action-oriented framework for breakthrough innovation. It lays out nine “Imperatives” towards this end, with concrete action steps for each to help cities get started, along with illustrative case studies.

Features: Guiding framework

The toolkit provides an approach and methods those looking for a new way to tackle social and policy issues by making services more valuable to customers and users, easier to use, with fewer resources wasted on implementing the right ideas in the wrong way (or on the wrong ideas entirely). This approach involves spending time understanding people’s experiences and resources on their own terms, taking methodical steps to analyse and address these with their active participation, and pushing for…

Features: Guiding framework, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

The Hackers’ Kit supports different types of discussions around project and program design. It's aim is to normalise innovation in a large organization by embedding new practices in key project management business processes. Worked on and tested with over 25 project teams in the United Nations Development Programme, the toolkit is intended for an international development context but could be applied to any large organisation with a desire to innovate. It includes a wall map of the process,…

Features: Facilitators guide, Guiding framework, Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

The Game of Life 2050 draws on scenarios for a sustainable European society in 2050. It is an interactive board game in which players consider four scenarios that describe the radical changes needed to be living within key environmental boundaries by 2050. The game takes a minimum of 2 hours to run (ideally 4 hours) and involves 5-7 actors (each played by one person or in pairs) and one Games Master. Play consists of three ‘rounds’ in which actors are given a set of circumstances that have…

Features: Facilitators guide, Interactive diagnostic

This resource distills the United Nations Development Programme's experience and lessons with running Social Innovation Camps into a "how-to" manual for others. The publisher intends it to broaden a project's results, attract donors, find new partners, source new perspectives on an issue, and/or place beneficiaries at the centre of project design. The resource was created within an international development and social innovation context but can be adapted for public sector use. It is available…

Features: Facilitators guide, Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

An collection of communication tools used in service design processes that deal with complex systems, organised by design activities, representations, recipients, and contents. The website is the result of the research activity done by Roberta Tassi during her graduation thesis investigating the relation between communication design and service design, starting from the observation of the existing practices in the field of service design. Each tool contains a description, how-to instructions,…

Features: Examples or Cases, Glossary, Guiding framework, Tactics, Techniques