You will be designing a new product or service, using open data, from initial concept to a minimum 'validate-able' product (MVP). You'll be drawing on your communication design skills to develop and pitch your product, fusing them with ideas and methods from business, such as the Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas to augment your thinking and develop services with your users at the centre. You'll get to extend your presentation skills, your human-centred design skills, product/service design skills, and have an opportunity to reflect on how your unique angle as a hybrid practitioner can support the creation of value for commercial and civic benefit. You'll also develop insight into designing with data. Depending on your project and your interest, you have the opportunity to explore and experiment with data-driven design concepts that may incorporate ideas such as data visualisation.

This studio combines knowledge entrepreneurship and innovation with communication design and user experience design, with sprinklings of Agile and Lean methodologies. It could be best summed up as Lean user-centred product design fused with your unique blend of abilities and interests.

Throughout the semester, you will be creating artefacts that demonstrate your knowledge, and will be using those artefacts as a part of presentations to pitch and communicate. As an entrepreneur pitching the value of the product or service using conceptual designs, as a designer getting feedback from your peers using wireframes or prototypes, and as a design practitioner reflecting on their own evolution via written reflection.

You will be developing a product/service concept from initial explorations of open datasets and brainstorming possibilities, to developing value propositions and pitches, to prototypes of your product to test your ideas, to getting feedback from peers on your designs to the final pitch of your product/service concept. You don't have to be a particularly data-literate person, or good at excel. You will be able to find and work with data in ways that suits your strengths.

1. Concept pitch – poster. The dataset, the target users, the value proposition 2. Product MVP. What's the smallest way to test the value proposition? 3. SKO - Dragon's den style product pitches, presenting the product and what was learned along the way