Toolkit Navigator

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.…

Features: Associated curriculum

A mashup of the original Business Model Canvas with lean startup methodology built in, this canvas is intended for social entrepreneurs to validate their offering, prioritise what to develop, and message the offering. This could also be used by a government service provider. The website includes a checklist to evaluate whether you will likely find value in using the canvas.

Features: Interactive diagnostic

This resource includes a framework, basic guidance and canvas for use in mapping and assessing organisational readiness and capacity development, designing and developing assessment criteria for capacity-building, facilitating strategic dialogue, supporting and assessing the impact of innovation teams and labs, and enabling structured focus on what elements should be prioritised in capacity-building efforts as well as for case production and knowledge sharing.

Features: Examples or Cases

This is a LinkedIn article exploring what a canvas for an Experimentation System should include. It is a way to visualise an experimentation system in a one-page view. It's author says it bring hundreds if not thousands of actions and decisions into context and helps to translate nebulous terms like 'innovation culture' into practical actions. The article offers explanations of the 20 building blocks and offers the canvas via email request.

The resource was designed to help organisations: develop a clearer understanding of the range of purposes of collaborations, reflect on the partnerships they have established, and focus on ways to strengthen new and existing partnerships by engaging in discussion about issues and ways forward. The resource contains guidance as well as an interactive partnership assessment tool. Although it was created with the health sector in mind, it is relevant for other sectors as well. For innovation…

Features: Checklist, Interactive diagnostic, Techniques

[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).

Features: Techniques

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.

Features: Examples or Cases, Techniques, Video guidance

14 methods and 3 recipes suggesting how to combine them, associated with a guide book available for sale by the toolkit publisher. Accompanying each method: Purpose, Outcomes, How to do it, and Tips as well as a worked example, to help readers understand how the method and associated template can be used at the early stage of designing an innovative service.

Features: Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

This canvas guides policy makers to derive specific policies and regulatory mechanisms in an agile and iterative manner – integrating both design thinking and evidence based policy making. An associated White Paper provides background on the approach.

Features: Examples or Cases

There is a free and paid version of this toolkit and an associated workshop offered by the publishers. The free version of the kit provides tools to structure your thinking when designing a service that includes machine learning elements. The core idea is that you first describe a user journey in a physical or digital space, and then use the materials from the kit to brainstorm service concepts in that space. The core materials include: - A booklet summarising key concepts for designing IA…

Features: Glossary, Tactics, Techniques