This course focuses on the benefits and practices of integrating design thinking (DT), including human-centered design, methods into qualitative inquiry. With roots in fields including architecture, visual design, engineering, and business, design thinking offers a complementary set of methods for eliciting participants’ experiences and perspectives, collaboratively making sense of qualitative data, and translating findings into accessible and actionable forms. These visual, participatory, and action-oriented methods can expand the qualitative researcher’s methodological toolkit while creating new opportunities to engage participants and research teams throughout the research process. When used intentionally—with attention to power, participation, context, and whose knowledge informs decisions—design thinking can also support culturally responsive approaches to qualitative research.

This interactive workshop begins with a brief orientation to design thinking and its relationship to qualitative inquiry. Through a combination of mini-lessons, case examples, and hands-on practice, participants will explore selected design thinking methods and consider when and how they might complement more traditional qualitative approaches. Participants will also experiment with suggested generative AI (GenAI) prompts that can support thoughtful integration of design thinking into qualitative research while considering where human interpretation and judgment remain essential.

While many approaches to design thinking exist, this course draws primarily on methods developed and popularized by IDEO. Participants will examine and practice methods that can be adapted across the qualitative research process—from participant recruitment and data collection to collaborative sensemaking, analysis, and dissemination—and consider the purpose, opportunities, and limitations of using each method in qualitative inquiry:

• Extremes and Mainstreams:Recruiting participants with a range of experiences and perspectives, including those at the edges of your intended audience, to surface needs and insights that may otherwise be overlooked
• Conversation Starters: Using prompts, images, scenarios, or other stimuli to spark discussion and elicit participants’ experiences, perspectives, reactions, and underlying reasoning
• Card Sorts: Inviting participants to organize, categorize, rank, or prioritize information to surface how they understand relationships, distinctions, and what matters most to them
• Download Your Learnings:Sharing observations and data gathered so that individual researchers’ learnings become part of the team’s collective knowledge
• Find Themes: Identifying patterns, similarities, differences, and relationships across qualitative data to begin making sense of what was learned
• Generating Insights: Moving beyond observations and themes to develop interpretations that reveal something meaningful about participants’ experiences, needs, behaviors, or motivations for future action
• Journey Maps: Visually representing an experience or process over time to illuminate key moments, decisions, emotions, interactions, and points of friction from participants’ perspectives
• Storyboards:Using a sequence of visual frames to communicate qualitative findings through concrete experiences, interactions, or scenarios