Courses of Study through eCornell 2022-2023 
    
    Apr 24, 2024  
Courses of Study through eCornell 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Design Thinking Certificate


In eCornell Certificate Programs  

Great design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s also about understanding your audience and their needs. Whether you’re designing a website, a physical product, or a customer experience, design thinking is an innovative approach to design that involves applied creativity, prototyping, and experimentation.

In this program, you will master a robust, human-centered approach to designing and improving products, experiences, and systems at any scale. Working with a team of student peers, you’ll start by defining the problem or challenge you seek to address and then gather key user insights that will help you develop powerful personas and narratives. From there, you’ll move into idea generation and rapid prototyping for potential solutions and improvements. Informed by testing and analysis, you’ll learn to iterate on and refine your prototype using design thinking methodology to ultimately generate a rigorous, viable design solution.

Throughout the courses, you will leverage design thinking to create a constant interplay of intuitive and data-driven decision making. You will also have the opportunity to bring the group project and your peer relationships with you as you move through each of the courses in this program.

The courses are best experienced when working with a project team of peers in the course. Please be prepared to be placed into a group to complete the majority of the coursework in this certificate program.

Key Takeaways


  • Record a compelling challenge statement that focuses your design effort on a meaningful question
  • Perform fieldwork to gather user insights
  • Interpret user data using modified systems engineering tools
  • Develop personas that empower you to envision innovative solutions
  • Create and refine a prototype
  • Use data and analysis to test and iterate on the prototype solution

What You’ll Earn


  • Design Thinking Certificate from Cornell
  • 90 Professional Development Hours (9 CEUs)

Who Should Enroll


  • User experience/UX designers
  • Marketers and designers
  • Product managers
  • Engineers
  • Program and project managers
  • Consultants
  • Systems analysts
  • Entrepreneurs involved in product conception
  • Individual contributors, managers and leaders at all levels of an organization who are involved in the design, development, or improvement of products, services, and infrastructure

Total Investment


  • 6 months to complete all the courses

How To Enroll


For more information on how to enroll, please visit Design Thinking Certificate