For the summer semester, HPI D-School would like to do its part to support Ukraine by donating a project partner spot in our innovation program to social initiatives that provide relief to people in Ukraine. Please reach out to us for an opportunity to become project partner and participate from April to August 2022.

From mid-April to August 2022, HPI School of Design Thinking will run its regular top-notch Design Thinking program that equips students with a mindset and tools to drive transformation processes in business and society. Six teams will work for 16 weeks on six design challenges submitted by partners from business, society and politics. While learning, the students conduct extensive research and develop innovative ideas to tackle the partner’s challenge.

This summer term, we would like to donated one project slot and offer it free of charge to a social initiative that is supporting people of Ukraine. At the HPI D-School, we stand for peaceful collaboration and co-creation, for human-centeredness, and diversity. We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the civil society in Russia bravely protesting against the actions of their government. Therefore, we have reserved one slot in our portfolio for a partner that is sharing our values and needs active help and some extra brains.

In order to apply as potential project partner to complete our portfolio, we kindly ask to fill out the online form until April 4th, 2022 and give us basic information about the design challenge that you would like to work on with a student team.

Basic requirements:

• Project partner can be a group of individuals or an organization

• You have time and energy to work closely with the student team

• You are actively involved in supporting people of Ukraine that have been affected by the impact of the war

• You have a clear mission and need concrete help conceptualizing, designing or prototyping offers or services to support people from Ukraine, be it refugees or those who decided to stay in the home country despite the on-going military conflict

• Your initiative is peaceful, embracing diversity and selfless

• Conducting this collaboration in English language is no problem to you

Your role as a project partner:

As a project partner you will become an active part in our academic program. However, after an initial briefing the students will be working very independently from their project partner. You should nevertheless calculate around 1-2 hours per week to connect with your team, test prototypes or just open doors for research. The program has scheduled four fixed dates and time slots that you as partner should block in your agenda:

28.04.2022 - Kick-off Meeting

30.05.2022 - 1^st Interim presentations & feedback meeting

30.06.2022 - 2^nd Interim presentations & feedback meeting

28.07.2022 -  Final presentations & feedback meeting

You will receive a documentation of the process, interim results and prototypes around four weeks after project end.

The current format of our program is hybrid, this means if time or other reasons do not allow it, you can decide with your team whether you would like to meet in person or online. The above listed interaction days are planned as virtual meetings.

Your gain as a project partner:

• deep insight and hands on experience of Design Thinking process and work mode in context of a real-life project relevant to project partner

• innovative solution proposals developed by international student teams

• detailed documentation of process and results

• promotion of your organization in HPI D-School’s network of young talents and recruiting opportunity 

• gaining experience and testing of new collaborative tools and highly flexible work environment settings

• access to Design Thinking community and networking opportunities with other project partners

Submit your challenge until April 4th, 2022

Please submit your challenge proposal via our online platform. We will get in touch for further details if something should be unclear to us. Together with you we will develop your challenge further once your project has entered the final selection process. Should you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at projects-d-school(at)hpi.de. 

Thank you for your application and good luck!