The course is composed of multiple interwoven parts. At first, the students are given a challenge (this year, geospatial data analyses in the context of healthcare). After an warm-up phase the students will use the acquired knowledge in combination with basic methods from Design Thinking to come up with an interesting challenge, on which they will focus and work on for the rest of the seminar. In order to tackle their challenge, students will learn how to manage and analyze the various data sources being available in the healthcare sector. Using that data, the students will look for patterns and interesting insights. As a last step, the student need to communicate their results using recent visualization techniques.
The participation in Trends and Concepts in the Software Industry I is recommended as a preparation for this lecture, but not mandatory. From the design perspective, topics include the design thinking process, innovation and prototyping methodologies, need finding, human factors, and team dynamics. The seminar schedule consists of the following:
- We start with the first hands-on exercise in the beginning of November.
- Following is a 2-day design thinking workshop in December where the basics of the design thinking methodology will be taught and applied in the context of our challenge.
- The user interviews and following brainstorming, need finding and prototyping sessions will be scheduled individually per team and compose the second part of the seminar.
- Another hands-on exercise as well as an intermediate presentation will take place between the workshop and the seminar.
- The next part of the seminar comprises the block lecture with Prof. Plattner where ideas will be presented before a jury. The prototypes will be evaluated, refined, and polished throughout this week, following a hackathon-like process. The lecture concludes with the documentation of the prototype.
