Design Masterclass

For over 30 years, we have worked as advisors and designers to global companies. Now, we have distilled this knowledge into a modular education program to improve your teams capabilities and solve your business challenges.

We have assembled a team of recognised experts in design management, customer and user experience, healthcare, brand and UI design. With our unique expertise and modular approach, we can work with you to build a customised Masterclass program to solve your design, innovation, and strategy challenges. Read more below.

Why Masterclass ?

D (David) : If I think back 5-10 years, design projects were very straight forward, with clients simply asking us to design the next ‘must have’ mobile phone.

But the world and design have changed, becoming increasingly complex. Meaning our clients can’t easily describe what they are trying to achieve. And at the same time, our longer term clients are asking us to help educate their teams with new processes and ways of thinking.

We realised the old ways of thinking about and structuring projects needed to change to fit today’s demands, so the Masterclass Program was conceived.

What is it ?

N (Nicole) : Simply, its a unique modular program that helps to identify and solve our clients business and design challenges.

Stepping out of the day-to-day to discuss and solve complex problems can be daunting for clients. So to start the conversation we created a set of question cards. These questions are the kinds of things we hear when we visit companies, for example: ‘How do we Succeed Overseas?’ or ‘Which Big Themes will Disrupt our Future?’

This is a simple and powerful tool that helps us to identify our clients goal. After this, we have a modular set of activities – including Remote Video Coaching, Looking-In and Out Research, Immersive Sessions and Design Sprints. These components can be combined in different ways to create a quick and cost effective problem solving process. Using this our clients can progress step by step as they learn more.

How does it work ?

D : If we take ‘Which Big Themes will Disrupt our Future?’ as an example, it’s a very broad question, so we start with some Remote Video Coaching to define the project parameters, and set ourselves and our clients some homework.

After this, we conduct some Looking-In and Out research. Looking-In being inside the clients organisation and Looking-Out talking to consumers and experts. This helps to identify the big themes impacting the clients business.

We then conduct some collaborative (The Division and the client) Immersive Sessions exploring these big themes to identify future business and consumer opportunities.

To follow, Design Sprints help to quickly develop and visualise these opportunities into, for example: product/UI and service ideas which can be shared and evaluated. And finally, we continue to support the development with further Remote Video Coaching.

How is it going ?

N : Great ! Our clients in Japan have been really receptive, we have had a lot of interest and have already completed a number of successful projects.

Our next step is to get this moving outside of Japan, where many companies also struggle with the same sort of issues. They have internal teams that can design, but don’t know how to define and think about these more complex issues.

Want to know more ?

If you are interested in hearing more please contact David (david@the-division.com) with a brief outline of your company and interest in the Masterclass program.

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