Pioneering a Design-led Approach to transform Higher Education Services

Abstract

In third level institutions, there are many disparate actors, systems and processes involved in service delivery and too often staff work in silos with little or no understanding of the personal impact of the student journey. The higher education sector endeavors to make all the services we deliver more useful, usable, efficient and student-centred but sometimes there is insufficient consideration of an overall approach to the actual student lifecycle and the supporting of same. The current complexity of the processes can cause frustration for those involved, in particular, front-line staff and students, particularly where there is a lack of cross-functional communication. There is a need to understand the service before introducing products into the service. An effort is now under way in one institute, to consider how Design Thinking could be applied to higher education services, as a series of iterative change projects, with the ambition of long-lasting sustainable change. This paper seeks to review existing literature in order to assess how one can build on previous experience, and make a contribution to the body of knowledge, based on the current dearth of research in the area of Design Thinking in higher education.