Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS
4.4.2019
This week, on our AICOS’ Thursdays with Science, we hosted Professor Peter Kaiser from the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences - Germany, in a session entitled “Design Thinking in Education”, with a special focus on engineering.
Professor Peter Kaiser presented in detail the concept of Design Thinking as an ideal approach to solve the problems that arise during the execution of an engineering project. Problems which are often complex and with no obvious solution in sight.
As so, Design Thinking presents itself as a methodology suitable to tackle this kind of problems, since it is radically different from the well-known engineering methods in many aspects: teams are typically interdisciplinary, solutions cannot be found by following established engineering rules and it should follow a method often described as Double Diamond – first: explore the problem, second: look for a solution.
Professor Peter Kaiser holds a diploma in computer science and a Ph.D. from the Technical University Munich and sees his role more as a coach than a lecturer. He supervises and coaches student projects in different areas, from computer science to communication design, or even user-centred projects. Another area of interest is software quality, especially for small and medium sized companies. His background includes experience in the software industry at Siemens and in applied research at Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE (Fraunhofer IESE).
Thursdays with Science is a weekly event hosted by Fraunhofer AICOS, dedicated to knowledge sharing and science debating, in a 30 minutes session gathering all of AICOS researchers in an open discussion forum.