Design-Thinking

I have been taught by so many teachers and I owe everything I’ve learnt and achieved to every teacher that I have come across. No, this is not a “Happy Teachers Day” post. 😁

So, how do I teach people whose profession is to teach people? Will they find my teaching methods as immature? Will they take me seriously? Doubts running in my head.

More than a year ago, Prof. Lochan Jolly from Thakur College of Engineering, Mumbai, reached out to me to hold a workshop on TRIZ. Almost instinctively, I agreed. Just as an afterthought, I asked about the level of proficiency of the audience. That’s when the good professor hit me with the news - The room will be full of teachers and professors.

Contradiction - I love the experience of being in a room and helping people apply TRIZ on a problem they care about. But, since I had never taught teachers before, I would probably hate the experience of worrying about if I was doing a good job or not. Talk about love-hate.

Right? Nope, wrong. The teachers were wonderful, so much so that I felt at ease. Not only that, I felt I should have suggested a two-day workshop instead of a one-dayer.

Attaining Innovation Nirvana through Karmic Design Thinking

in Teaching

2021-01-06

Indian thinking, western philosophy - This is how a colleague of mine, Prof. Mukul Joshi, from FORE management school, New Delhi, described my treatment of design thinking (https://dt.balaramadurai.net). He invited me to give a talk to the students of FORE management school located in New Delhi about this topic. I was not sure if I would use the same phrase to describe Design Thinking. This is a philosophy, yes. This is a way of thinking, yes. But, can we attribute a certain geography to these? I wasn’t sure.

GE Global invited talk on Design Thinking: The Zen Way

in Teaching

2020-09-21

Dr. Srinivas Chirravuri and Gautam Goenka, are seasoned facilitators from GE Crotonville, the learning bastion of GE. In these times of online meetings and webinars, Dr. Srinivas, or Ch as he prefers to be addressed, and Gautam have thought of a series of enlightening topics. One of the topics they had chosen for such a session was Design Thinking. Ch reached out to me and from the outset, we wanted the talk to be a bit different from other webinars that I had given in the past.

Ajeenkya D Y Patil University talk on Design Thinking

in Teaching

2020-08-17

On 13th Aug, 2020, I interacted with students from the Ajeenkya D Y Patil University, Pune. The talk is part of a Start to Scale talk series to help students scale up their business idea. In my opinion, design thinking will go a long way in helping early stage startups in understanding their customers.

Let me tell you two startup stories: Quick Fire, Slow Burn and Quick Try, Sure Improve.

DONE Telling stories - a lengthy, but effective way of communication

in Teaching

2020-04-07

Recently, I came across a TED talk on storytelling¹ and I forwarded the link to my friend. His response to that was in the form of a question, “Bala, why do you like stories?” This post is a reply to his question describing the reason I like stories. I won’t disappoint you, I do have a story in there…

Design Thinking - A Primer (MOOC Open for Registration)

in Teaching

2018-11-22

It was August 2011, a few months before I quit the company, a gentleman tossed a question at me, “If I lose my job as a Java programmer to a computer which will write Java code by itself, then so will you. Without me, who will you teach?”

I had merely applied one of the trends of technology evolution and showed the participants of my workshop a demo that they would understand. Code that might write itself.

I had by no means hinted that I was going to fire him. But, I thought about this for quite some time.

Who will replace professors, trainers and consultants?

It is better that I replace myself rather than someone else, so I decided to record it all into a computer and deliver it as a course.

So, here goes. I am very glad to announce the launch of an online course on Design Thinking on an online platform called NPTEL - National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. I am co-teaching this course with Prof. Ashwin Mahalingam from IIT, Madras. The course is available at https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc19%5Fmg23/. The course is now open for registration and we will start in Feb 2019. The wonderful folks at IISER, Pune, hard working people at NPTEL, my creative teaching assistant, Siddharth Maturi and his buddies - Nithin, Sam and Suprativ helped us with making this course possible.

Bugs Bunny and His HR Problem

By deotimaco in Teaching

2018-02-09

These students from the HR division (Team Bullseye) submitted the following story (based on a true story) as part of their course on design thinking. They used the Karmic Design Thinking methodology. I found it very entertaining and educating. Their selfie of the entire team which wrote this piece is on the way. Pigeons take time to deliver messages, you know ;) I had fun reading this. Hope you do too!

Once upon a time there lived a rabbit named Bugs Bunny. He was employed by Mr. Kangaroo who ran a carrot cultivation farm. Mr. Bugs Bunny was very hardworking and dedicated employee and always loved to give his best. One fine day when he was picking up the carrots, his assistant, Ms. Chipmunk came running to him informing him that his mother broke her back after a monkey on the tree accidently dropped a coconut on her. She was immediately hospitalized and Bugs Bunny rushed there.

Customer Journey Map - View Point Of A Beginner

By vivek in teaching

2017-05-24

Vivek Swaminathan is my student from the MBA Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India. He is my first guest blogger. Hope you enjoy the post as much as I did!

Courses I Teach Students

in Teaching

2017-04-27

“What is it that you do?” a dreaded question for people who are on their own and are pursuing multiple passion, dimensions, projects and goals. Check out these videos on why this is such a dreaded question for people like me. If you are one of those people who dread this question, may be you’ll like these videos that I have to share as part of this post.

Another one who clarifies this subject is this man - Adam Leipzig in a jovial TED talk.

Karmic Design Thinking - Part 3 - Defining Structure

in Teaching

2016-12-22

karmic design thinking

To refresh on stuff - Rethinking Design Thinking and What is Karmic Design Thinking were things that I talked about earlier.

The broad design of this form of design thinking consists of these four stages:

I. People Orientation (or System Orientation)
This is the stage in which we acknowledge the deficiencies in the system and try and find out about what is it that people are going through. Or if it is a device or a service, our job is to figure out what is it that this system is doing.