Good For: Practise empathy and active listening
The Design Process Mini-Guide is five-page document outlining a design process taught at the Stanford d.school. The school gives this resource to students after a short design experience, to help solidify the takeaways and abstract the experience to useful framework. The publishers suggest using the document in conjunction with an action-oriented design experience, such as their related Gift Giving Project and Wallet Project. This resource is on an older archive version of the d.school website.…
The Gift-Giving Project is 90-minute (plus debrief) fast-paced project though a full design cycle, intended to give learners a tangible experience with design thinking. It is intended as a group activity (from 2 to 100+ participants) with a facilitator.
Learners pair up to interview each other, come to a point-of-view of how they might design for their partner, ideate, and prototype a new solution to "redesign the gift-giving experience" for their partner. The resource includes a handout, a…
This is canvas and background guidance around a set of principles for co-design, inspired by the principles developed by the NSW Council of Social Services. The principles are: Outcomes-focused, Inclusive, Participative, Respectful, Adaptive.
The canvas includes an example case study.
[Now defunct. Link goes to internet archive from 2018, when MindLab closed]. One of the pioneers of public sector design, Mindlab, developed a set of tools to find and define problems as well as new approaches to solving them. This toolset contains some of the most commonly used in the design practice (user journey, pattern recognition, etc).
This resource focuses on inclusive design, a methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity, including those with limited abilities. The resource includes a guide on inclusive design, multiple short-films and a 20-minute documentary, as well as activity cards that follow 5 phases of a design process.
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…
A collection of tools that describe how 18F digital service teams put human-centered design into practice. These cards are focused on design in the context of digital services, but can be adapted to non-technical design projects as well.
The resource is online and also available as printable cards.
The card set includes simplified information on various design methods according to an overall methodology: Discover, Decide, Make,Validate. There are also "Fundamentals" cards related to incentives,…
This toolkit is for people help each other map out the skills, knowledge, resources and capabilities they have in order to respond to, and effect, change in their community.
The Possible Futures Lab of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London originally developed the toolkit to assist grassroots co-creation in the community of Pallion, Sunderland. They have made their toolkits available to others to adapt.
This online library contains over 400 facilitation resources, available with free login. Tools are organised by topic: Team, Energiser, Idea generation, Issue resolution, Explore and understand, Action. They include information such as time required, group size, difficulty, materials, step-by-step instructions, tips, and variations as well as user comments.
This private company also offers free and paid session planner software using the methods in the library.