Join our Design Thinking workshop series to turn your product or service ideas into market-ready solutions.

Through two user-centred workshops – Inspiration and Ideation – combined with follow-up support and 1-to-1 guidance, you’ll gain deep customer insights, create and refine prototypes, and test them for real-world impact. Led by Dr Camilo Soler Caicedo, Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, this workshop series is perfect for small, local, or growing businesses to learn how to innovate with confidence and bring their ideas to life faster.

These workshops are brought to you as part of the BIG South London Business, Innovation & Growth Programme, delivered by Kingston University and funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

---

Agenda

23 September, 10:00 – 16:00 – Workshop 1: Who are we working for? (Inspiration)

We will learn from our customers and get the right inspiration for what we want to do based on the audience we want to add value to. We will leave the workshop with some ideas on what we need to know from our customers so we can progress our product idea. Activities include:

• Warm up and introduction to the approach – The five stages of design thinking: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.
• Understanding our users (Brainstorming) – How much do we know them?
• Understanding ourselves (Reflective Narrative) – What can we offer?
• Understanding the gap (Value Proposition Canvas) – What do we need to know?
• Finding the bridge (Observation Design) – How can we find out what we don’t know?

4 November, 10:00 – 16:00 – Workshop 2: What can we do for them? (Ideation)

We will come up with great new ideas to develop our original product based on the analysis of what we learnt from customers. We will leave with an initial ultra-low-cost prototype to test and further refine those ideas into something desired, doable, and promising. Activities include:

• Reflecting back (Hindsight Journaling) – What did we observe and ask? Were the answers what we expected? What was obvious? What was new?
• Invigorate your idea (Brainstorming) – How can we better address the needs and wants of our customers? What needs changing in the idea?
• Back to the canvas (Value Proposition Canvas) – What needs updating in our initial canvas from last session?
• There’s one way to find out (Sketching) – We will develop a “creative” low-resolution test prototype by drawing and sketching the ideas derived from the insights. With the user at the centre, what is the simplest version or dummy product we could run to check how our customers would react? The quicker and simpler to implement, the merrier.
• The mum test (Actionable Insights Design) – We will learn how to chat with our customers about ideas without leading them, but rather learning from them.

 

---

Key outcomes of the workshops include:

• A developed sense of empathy for customers/users with a Customer Insights Plan (CIP).
• An approach to gather customer insights via observation, interaction or informal conversation for Customer Insight Analysis (CIA).
• A first low-resolution Product Initial Prototype (PIP) test to verify assumptions in interaction with customers.
• A prototype to test in real conditions and a Plan for Iteration and Actioning (PIA) guide to keep testing and improving it.

 

1-hour follow-up meetings with participating businesses will commence on a first-come, first-served basis between:

• 1-to-1 sessions, First round: 28/09/2025 – 13/10/2025
• 1-to-1 sessions, Second round: 11/11/2025 – 01/12/2025

 

In these 1-to-1 meetings, businesses can:

• Track their success in the deployment of the CIP and the analysis of feedback.
• Track progress in testing their prototypes and follow up with changes to the new product/service prototype.
• Finalise the report on the final product and adjust their idea to changing conditions.
• Access guidance to maintain testing

Register now