Skip to main content

DelftX: Product Design: The Delft Design Approach

Learn to design meaningful products and services in this introductory design course.

7 weeks
6–8 hours per week
Self-paced
Progress at your own speed
Free
Optional upgrade available

There is one session available:

100,287 already enrolled! After a course session ends, it will be archivedOpens in a new tab.
Starts Mar 19
Ends Jul 31

About this course

Skip About this course

Do you want to learn how to design? Using the Delft Design Approach, you will learn how to use a number of key design methods to create meaningful products and services.

This course is an introduction to the Delft Design Approach offering a model and a set of signature methods from Delft to teach you how to get from understanding the user in context to defining a meaningful design challenge and - in the end - deliver a great design! The course challenges you to experience the design process yourself and reflect on your work with the help of students and excellent teaching staff from Delft, and industrial experts.

No previous knowledge of design methods is required, yet some experience with designing (something) is helpful.

This course has been awarded with the 2015 Open Education Award for Excellence in the category 'Open MOOC' by the Open Education Consortium.

At a glance

  • Institution: DelftX
  • Subject: Business & Management
  • Level: Intermediate
  • Prerequisites:
    • Some familiarity with concepts like 'design thinking', 'User-centered design' and 'Design process' is advised.
    • Some experience with designing something (even for yourself) will be helpful.
  • Language: English
  • Video Transcripts: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, हिन्दी, Bahasa Indonesia, Português, Kiswahili, తెలుగు, Türkçe, 中文
  • Associated programs:
  • Associated skills:Product Design

What you'll learn

Skip What you'll learn
  • How to study users in their own environment;
  • How to translate user insights into a design challenge that will spark creativity;
  • How to create a meaningful design to meet your challenge;
  • How to design and to structure your projects with the support of design thinking, a model and several methods;
  • How to evaluate and present your design.

This course is self-paced and structured along 6 steps. Most steps can be done in about a week, except for step 5 which might take two weeks). The course is then structured as follows:

Step 1: Understanding meaning in design
​•How do the things around us attain their meaning?
​•How and why do we design meaningful things?

Step 2: Understanding the context of use
• How and why do we gain empathic understanding of the users we design for?
• How do we derive insights to inspire the design process?

Step 3: Defining a design challenge
• How do we identify the key design problem when we look at the user's current situation?
• How do we define a meaningful design challenge that will drive the creative phases of design?

Step 4: Generating ideas
• How do we generate ideas?
• How do we filter promising ideas?

Step 5: Developing concepts (Optional EXTRA: Prototyping Concept)
• What is a design concept and how do we develop a concept?
• What role does sketching have in developing concepts?
• How do we evaluate concepts and decide between them?

Step 6: Testing with user & final presentation (Optional EXTRA: Testing Prototype of Concept)
• How do we test key qualities of a concept?
• How do we present a concept?

Learner testimonials

Skip Learner testimonials

" The Delft Design course taught me how to fully understand the end-users and their needs and how to meet them through product development."
Joseph,the Philippines.

More about this course

Skip More about this course

LICENSE

The course materials of this course are Copyright Delft University of Technology and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International License.

This course is part of Product Design & Health Professional Certificate Program

Learn more 
Expert instruction
2 skill-building courses
4 months
4 - 6 hours per week

Interested in this course for your business or team?

Train your employees in the most in-demand topics, with edX For Business.