Katja Tschimmel

• Ph.D. Design
• Lecturer at University of Porto

The unique contribution of design in addressing increasingly com-plex and cross disciplinary challenges, and how design education and researchmust change to answer to these challenges, is being discussed by the worldwidedesign community. At the same time, as it shifted from a purely practice disci-pline to an academic one, design is still taking th...

Science communication is recognized as an increasingly relevant field within society because it allows for the communication of research results to non-specialized audiences, nurturing scientific literacy among citizens. In this landscape, the field of Design, especially design thinking, has been making valuable contributions by enhancing communica...

The book "Creativity and Innovation Affairs: Are they or are they not…?" is dedicated to clarify ambiguous concepts from the world of creativity and innovation. One of the initial triggers for the development of the book was the perceived ambiguity of the binomials Design vs. Design Thinking and Innovation vs. Invention. Frequently, designers and i...

Although Creativity, Design and Design Thinking appear frequently in popular and business contexts, the terms are often confused. Even in the design and management communities several doubts remain about the concepts behind these terms, since they overlap, complement and sometimes contradict each other. This article seeks to throw light on the inte...

After conducting presentations and workshops about research methodologies with design doctoral students from different countries and universities over the last three years, the authors have noticed that students are usually eager to learn more about how to design a strong and coherent methodical research plan matching their research questions, and...

Under the Portugal Social Innovation programme, investment in social innovation projects increased significantly in the country. This article focuses on the development of a systematic method for social innovation that helps to develop original and people-centred results. The study presented here demonstrates the relationship between Design Thinkin...

As part of a process of academic legitimation, those who have represented design research at universities have been encouraged to build the epistemological and methodological foundations of a discipline that can be recognised and legitimated by other disciplines in the academic community. Consequently, the construction of a consistent and coherent...

Designers, we have a problem! The ever-expanding field of design is causing turmoil in its practice and education. There is a growing concern originating from the profession now dealing with complex global problems requiring new skills, obscuring the once well-defined boundaries of design practice. Collaborating with other fields of knowledge is no...

Trata-se de uma prova do livro trilíngue em forma de diálogo entre as autoras Angélica Sátiro e Katja Tschimmel com desafios ilustrados (por numerosos artistas e designers) para pôr o pensamento criativo em ação. This is a sample of the trilingual book in the form of a dialogue between both authors Angélica Sátiro and Katja Tschimmel with illustra...

This article is a chapter of the book "The Creativity Virus", published by Katja Tschimmel in 2019, on the 15th of April 2019 in honour of Leonardo da Vinci's 567th anniversary and in the context of the World Creativity and Innovation Week. The article introduces the evolution of the concept 'creativity' from a psychological to a systemic Approach.

Based on continual social and technological transformations, many academics and governmental organisations call attention to the need for urgent changes in Education. Design Thinking (DT), an innovation method derived from design methodology connected to business innovation, has shown itself also as an useful method to be applied in the innovation...

The E.6 2 model and this toolkit was developed in an organisational context (www.mindshake.pt) to promote Design Thinking and to show how to apply the DT tools in practice. We elaborated the toolkit for our clients in Portugal and abroad, but also for everybody interested in experimenting the DT approach in innovation projects. Feel invited to try...

Many business and innovation managers and academics have been calling attention to the need for urgent changes in business school curricula and learning methods, prompted by the continual social, economic and technological transformation of our uncertain world. This paper provides an introductional approach to the concept of Design Thinking and its...

As a response to continual social and technological transformations, many organisations call attention to the need for urgent changes to educational systems. Because of its collaborative and creative approach, its cross-disciplinary and human-centredness, Design Thinking is seen as a useful mindset and method to face the challenge of a new learning...

Some say we live in a world rapidly entering into dystopia, designers prefer to focus on new paradigms for society. New technologies emerging every day, robotisation, artificial intelligence, digital nomadism and a myriad of other profound changes in the way we live, learn and work seem to point to a redesign of Design and its Education. Accordingl...

The D-THINK toolkit is aimed at educators from Higher Education and VET Institutions, and is intended to be an active toolkit to support the use of Design Thinking as a method to: - Renew their educational approaches and methodologies; - Update and learn how to redesign learning experiences; - Promote the acquisition of “new skills” — such as sense...

Recent literature suggests that the development of cognitive skills should constitute explicit learning objectives in design education. The work describes an educational intervention designed with the intention of promoting the creative and critical thinking performance of a group of Portuguese design students. To this end, creativity and critical...

Within the fruitful discussion about what design research should mean and achieve and the implication for doctoral education, this paper aims to explore the topic regarding the boundaries between project design research and academic design research. There is also a strong movement within the academic milieu in the realm of design, namely within int...

O conceito de Cidades Criativas e a sua operacionalidade emergem num contexto que envolve criatividade, inovação e economia. As práticas discursivas veiculadas nos documentos governamentais e nos estudos académicos sobre Cidades Criativas, associam-nas a conjuntos urbanos de grande dimensão e de elevada concentração de criatividade. Porém, surgiram...

Recent literature suggests that the development of cognitive skills, namely creative and critical thinking skills, should constitute explicit learning goals in the engineering design domain. Given the characteristics of design problems, product design and development courses, usually functioning according to project based learning methodology, cons...

The presented work reports on a case study on the application of the Design Thinking model E6 to the design of an educational initiative aimed at promoting creative and critical thinking in higher education. The model divides the creative process into six phases and two sub phases and suggests thirty six facilitating techniques. The main contributi...

Many academic organisations are calling attention to the need for urgent changes in curricula and learning methods demanded by the continual social transformation of an increasingly technological world. Transversal skills such as the ability to think creatively and critically, take initiative, and work collaboratively for common goals, are essentia...

O que torna um designer num Design Thinker? Será que um não designer pode ser um Design Thinker? Será que se pode ser um designer sem ser um Design Thinker?

Palavras chave: informação médica, design, literacia e saúde. Relevância do tema: Este estudo pretende, através da análise visual dos relatórios de análises clínicas, fazer um levantamento dos problemas de design existentes que dificultam ou impedem o acesso à informação médica e a sua compreensão. Resumo: A ausência de recursos, as atitudes de ris...

Palavras chave: informação médica, design, literacia e saúde. Relevância do tema: Este estudo pretende, através da análise visual dos relatórios de análises clínicas, fazer um levantamento dos problemas de design existentes que dificultam ou impedem o acesso à informação médica e a sua compreensão. Resumo: A ausência de recursos, as atitudes de ris...

The creation of jewelry involves processes, which are often very experimental and intuitive, encompassing both the creative process and production techniques. In this paper, which is based on a recently realized research project in narrative jewelry, we will reveal and reflect on the process of creating and producing a series of jewelry pieces, bas...

The relationship between jewelry and drawing varies in accordance with the designer’s approach to the project, his skills and tastes, and also with the differing types of jewelry. The individual jeweler considers drawing an essential tool in the different stages of the creative process, both for registering ideas and visualizing concepts, as well a...

The research in this paper is based on a theoretical and practical approach to the concept of Design Thinking, its background, characteristics, process models and toolkit. Alongside the literature review, a qualitative analysis of five well-known models of the Design Thinking process and of ten of the most applied DT tools is made. The paper provid...

Design thinking is thinking in variety and in new semantic and material combinations. To think about the possibilities, the designer needs to liberate himself from routines of perception. This liberation is the basis for all innovative design. Taking into account the dominant role of a deliberately orientated perception in the creative design proce...

Desde há 15 anos, Katja Tschimmel investiga o fenómeno da criatividade e os mecanismos do processo e pensamento criativos que levam a inovação; em design e em outras áreas de conhecimento. Este livro, que tem a estrutura de um manual, é um reflexo de estos estudos. Também é a continuação de um diálogo publicado sobre a emergência de ideias com Juan...

Introdução A grande maioria dos projectos caracteriza-se pelo facto de o designer, ou o arquitecto, se ver perante um terreno desconhecido, que deve explorar e que o poderá levar a diferentes possibilidades de expressão e objectivos. Ele procura a ideia e a forma expressiva que lhe parece a mais adequada a um determinado contexto, aquela que vai co...

This year, 2009, is the European Year of Innovation and Creativity. Considering the speed of social, economic, environmental and technological change, the challenge of this millennium is to design a culture of creativity: a culture which is open to all changes and new opportunities and which is able to solve the many serious problems that the world...

Juan Rodrigo (JR) y Katja Tschimmel (KT) desarrollan en una conversación dos áreas temáticas que acaban siendo una: la de la capacidad creativa de un sistema.

This paper attempts to show that the conscious use of perception in creative design and its training allows students not only to significantly improve the originality of their final design results, but also to improve their working performance and their understanding of the diversity of life itself. Perception is placed at the core of design thinki...

Knowledge from neuroscience, and investigation about creativity, show us that traditional learning models are a block to learning directed at future challenges in our 'knowledge society'. We have to aim for creative thinking and learning, which stimulate the development of a system by change, renovation and restructuring. The constructivist approac...

Design is characterized as an open process of transformation. Information about the project and knowledge of the subject are important elements of the resulting design, but creative thinking is even more essential. A successful designer is not the one who only knows how to handle technical, semantic or methodical knowledge, but the one who also has...

Our thinking and learning process is influenced by the fact that the brain is a self-referential system. Knowledge from Constructivist Theory and cognitive psychology is fundamental for the conception of a new discipline that we are starting to develop in our Design School. Understanding and trying out different kinds of cognitive processes in desi...

revista da UFP, Nº 2, Vol. 1, Edições Universidade Fernando Pessoa