Free Design Thinking Courses & Certifications

Design is an emerging discipline that has gained recognition in the last two decades. It is the study of the transformation of utilitarian products to fit the needs of a service or system. It bridges the gap between technology and the needs behind using said technology. Design Practice programme is an online postgraduate beginner course that will dive into the various concepts of product design. 

Design Practice certification is an industry-supported course that will be ideal for faculty and students studying mechanical engineering and product design. It is an elective course of eight weeks, where participants will be provided with assignments and video lectures to help them capture the maximum benefit this course has to offer. 

Design Practice course syllabus has been designed by IIT Kanpur in association with NPTEL. The course will be taught by Professor Shantanu Bhattacharya of IIT Kanpur. This is a free audit programme that offers certification to interested candidates who qualify for eligibility.

The Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success course is designed to boost your creative thinking and help you come up with innovative ideas more frequently. It will help you communicate novel ideas in engaging using innovative ways, produce original solutions, and address problems from unique angles.

By using the lessons from the Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success programme, you can train yourself to use your natural creativity at optimum potential, break away from conventional thoughts, and grab opportunities at the right time. You will develop the ability to view things from new viewpoints and act accordingly. This course is offered in the self-paced mode and it can be taken by paying the course fee or free. In the free audit mode, the candidates will be given access only for a limited period. 

Today’s information overload makes it difficult to think out-of-the-box. Innovative employees are highly in demand across various industries. The Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success MOOC will provide you with a ‘toolbox’, which will give you some techniques and behaviours that will spark your inventiveness and ingenuity.

This IsraelX certificate course Design Theory is the first of its kind in being a pioneer for exploring theories of design. The course aims to impart the key concepts and fundamental knowledge behind Design Theory and elucidates its relation with culture, arts and economics. In this course, the candidate will gain an understanding of the scope of design and the role it plays in everyday life. It is a six-week program and the student needs to dedicate his or her effort for 3 to 4 hours a week. It is a self-paced course taught in English at an intermediate difficulty level. Design Theory certification course helps the student to gain an in-depth understanding of these discourses and key issues in design theory and the analytical tools employed for proceeding towards it. The designers globally are redefining the meaning of design and how well it is constructed in relation to the dynamics of politics, society and economics.

The Design Thinking: Empathizing to Understand the Problem certification programme is a programme which enhances the design thinking of the candidates. The aim of this course is to make the candidate think outside of the box to uncover the points and to innovate from regular thinking.

Design Thinking: Empathizing to Understand the Problem course also focuses on the MicroMasters programme to teach the candidates how to use simple methodologies for research which includes active listening. Active listening helps the candidate to understand the target audience in order to identify their needs. Special importance is given to observation and interviewing as they are the key methods to understand the user’s viewpoint and experience.

Design Thinking: Empathizing to Understand the Problem course is a certification programme where a verified and shareable certificate is provided. The logo of the institution and the signature of the instructor are carried on the certificate. This certificate adds a glow to the candidates’ curriculum vitae. This will bring them a great job opportunity. Candidates who are willing to start or restart their career can benefit from Design Thinking: Empathizing to Understand the Problem certification. Scholarships are also provided to eligible candidates. 

EdX provides two varied enrolment options; verified mode by paying the fee and audit track for free of cost. In the audit track, the students will have access to the course only for a limited period of time. 

Design Thinking is a systematic yet flexible process for defining and solving problems. The Design Thinking Fundamentals program offers an introduction to the elementary activities related to the design thinking process. A common misconception about design thinking is that it requires artistry, but does not revolve around artistic principles. It is not just a strategy, but a mindset that you can apply to solve any industry problems.

The Design Thinking Fundamentals certification syllabus will help you explore various methods for developing better ideas, evaluating complex problems, and establishing innovative solutions with a user’s requirements in mind. It provides an end-to-end overview of the design thinking process, focusing on the significance of understanding the user and developing viable, feasible, and desirable ideas.

The Design Thinking Fundamentals certification is a component of the Design Thinking MicroMasters course, offered by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). You can complete this course comfortably within six short weeks if you study around six to eight hours/week. The self-paced programme can be pursued by the learners either by paying the fee or free of cost. When enrolled in the free audit mode, the learners can get a limited duration of access to the course. 

Ideation and iteration are critical steps in the design thinking process. They are what differentiates design thinking from linear and traditional problem-solving techniques. The Design Thinking: Ideation, Iteration, and Communication certification syllabus will cover all the useful ideation techniques including brainstorming, role-playing, storyboarding, mind mapping, model making, strategic idea mapping, and concept sketching.

To design an innovative and successful solution, you need to think of creative ideas and iterate them. And after the ideation stage, you need to select the best solution(s) to address the problem, and present/communicate it to stakeholders. The Design Thinking: Ideation, Iteration, and Communication program will introduce you to the best practices for analyzing and selecting solutions, and common mistakes that people make while communicating these solutions to clients.

The Design Thinking: Ideation, Iteration, and Communication certification course is brought to you by the Rochester Institute of Technology, and it is part of their MicroMasters in Design Thinking. If candidates wish to receive a course completion certificate at the end, they can do so by paying a nominal fee. They can also share the certificate on their LinkedIn account, or attach it to their resume or portfolio. While taking the course in the free mode, the learners can audit it for a limited period. 

After proposing a solution, the first thing you need to do to put it into action is to create a prototype. Prototyping and user testing are critical elements of the design-thinking process, and you can learn about them in the Design Thinking: Prototyping and User Testing certification course. It houses video lectures and English transcripts to allow for self-paced learning. 

Prototyping is an iterative process, and you will appreciate it better by examining the case studies that are a part of the curriculum. In the Design Thinking: Prototyping and User Testing programme, you will learn how to implement user testing and evaluate the results obtained from it. You can complete the programme comfortably in six weeks if you study eight to twelve hours a week.

Design Thinking: Prototyping and User Testing training is an intermediate-level programme. Surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other methods, tools, and best practices for assessing solutions are part of this online course. Moreover, this course is part of the Design Thinking MicroMasters programme offered by the Rochester Institute of Technology. EdX offers two different enrolment options to join the programme; paid and free mode. In the paid mode, the learners will get unlimited access and a certificate whereas in the free mode, they can get only limited access to the programme. 

Design Thinking Capstone online course is an intermediate course in Business and Management. It is six weeks long, shareable, and a part of the MicroMasters Design Thinking series available on the edX website. This course will provide candidates with a cumulative experience of all the aspects of end-to-end design thinking processes.

The Rochester Institute of Technology developed the Design Thinking Capstone program. It is an instructor-led course taught by Dean Emerita Lorraine Justice, Professor of Design at RIT. This course emphasizes practical problem-solving methods, allowing students to better understand the course material. Towards the end of the program, candidates will demonstrate their understanding by submitting a final project and documentation that support their findings. 

Design Thinking Capstone by edX requires a weekly effort of eight to twelve hours. Post-training completion and fee payment, a verified and shareable certificate is obtainable. The certification includes the Rochester Institute of Technology logo and is signed by the instructor. 

The Design Thinking and Global Startup Training Course focuses on the systematic engineering design methodology which is the Stanford Design Thinking process. During this course, students will learn about 4th industrial revolution technologies such as Factory as a service (FaaS) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big data and 3D printing. Students will also learn about the tools such as one-liner, lean-canvas and global investor relations (IR) in this course.

The Design Thinking and Global Startup Online Course is of 6-weeks in duration which will be instructed by Yoon Yong Jin, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The course will be taught through expert lecture videos and assessed through module quizzes. The course will be beneficial for learners who are aspiring to become entrepreneurs or those who wish to start their own global innovative startups. Learners will be rewarded with a certificate after successful course completion.

Many business and non-business organizations are starting to adopt design thinking as a practice and as a strategy to develop solutions for their problems. Business schools and other institutions have also made design thinking a part of their curriculum. To learn more about design thinking, take the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Design Thinking: Theories and Applications online course.

The Design Thinking: Theories and Applications program demystifies design thinking, and breaks it down into its five stages: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It will help you develop a holistic, human-centric, and non-linear approach. It defines design thinking not as a problem-solving process, but more as the behavior or the attitude when dealing with a complex problem.

The Design Thinking: Theories and Applications training will help you develop the personal traits that all design thinkers must possess: human-centeredness, a creative and flexible thinking style, high self-efficacy, and being comfortable with intuitive and subjective judgment. Not only will you be able to solve problems, but you will also be able to find opportunities. The introductory course in design is self-paced.

Problem-solving skills are essential in the present world. More often than not, traditional methods are not enough to solve creative hindrances. The Using Creative Problem-Solving course by Future Learn will help you discover how unique approaches to problem-solving and creative thinking can assist you in your daily life and improve your workplace reputation. Candidates who participate in this programme will explore creative problem-solving and learn the essential skills that will boost their capacity to think out-of-the-box.

The Using Creative Problem-Solving online programme aims to teach the candidates through practical learning methods. There will be an interactive map called ZeeMaps which they will use to build up an international learner’s community. The candidates will also be invited to post their creative projects on Padlet. This is an online virtual bulletin board which they can use for collaborations, interactions and sharing links and pictures.

Additionally, the Using Creative Problem-Solving course is taught by Sirirat Lim, a top instructor and a University of Cambridge graduate. The course duration is four weeks, with classes every week for three hours. This is an online training and students can undertake it, completely free of cost.

The introductory course on Odyssey planning by edX is apt for students who want to explore the realms of lives and their associated meaning in order to design lives that you want to make. The course provides a quality platform for online education in partnership with Stanford online education, a world-renowned prestigious university. Odyssey planning training is crafted with individual importance which can be pursued separately even though it's part of Stanford's 10 weeks program on Designing your life. This self-paced course is provided with online lectures given by Stanford's experienced panel of faculties.

Odyssey planning online program mainly highlights the main aim of teaching the students on how to make use of thinking to design and develop an effective and efficient approach towards building your vocation, which also includes an in-depth study of key concepts like Odyssey plan, the study of life, Different timelines like 5-years and 10-years and so on.

Strategical skills are important for the development of any business, and to provide a broader vision. Design thinking is the broader process that helps businesses by providing an approach for the better working of the organization. Design thinking is the concept that helps to represent a set of cognitive, strategic, and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. It is a progressive approach when entrepreneurs and board members have a pre-defined design that can take their company to heights of success. The course on Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship is an initiative by the University of Sydney for the candidates who have an interest in learning about the design-led strategy. 

Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship training is delivered by the experts through online mode on the platform Coursera. This is an online course of 3 weeks which can be completed in 17 hours of classes. The candidates will be exposed to different activities, assignments, and tutorials for the overall development. The candidate will also receive Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship certification by the University of Sydney and Coursera at the end of the course. 

The Design Thinking in Data Science online course is developed to present to the candidates the domain of data science and the techniques and strategies involved in the field. It is offered by the research and consulting educational institution concerned with data science. This online course helps develop data science skills based on engineering and business. The Design Thinking in Data Science online programme has a course schedule of 20 classes that are held live for 1 hour per week and the candidate will be required to spend an additional four to five hours per week. 

The course study is about learning programming and the fundamentals of data science with regard to the coding, mathematics, and business aspects beneficial for those who aspire to become data scientists. The online course instruction is done by qualified professional Dr. Dakshinamurthy V Kolluru, the founder, president, and chief mentor at INSOFE. The course modules and lectures provide an experiential learning process to the candidates.