Multicampus event: Design Thinking seminar, all campuses worldwide

The SKEMA Design Thinking Seminar 2023 brought together 1,300 students from Master in Management (PGE, M1) and around 30 professors from our campuses in France, China, the USA, and Brazil over three days in February. In a challenge laid on during the three-day seminar, students were asked to develop an understanding of their users by conducting interviews with caregivers and adopt a creative mindset, to think “out of the box”. 

They worked in teams on how to improve the well-being of individuals with disabilities. "Using primary data from their interviews combined with ideas brainstorming, and digital prototyping through Mural, an online collaboration platform, 250 virtual teams worked intensively on a global scale to come up with solutions that aim to improve the lives of individuals with physical, mental, or relational disabilities. The challenge was deeply meaningful for the students. They were strongly engaged and demonstrated empathy, and creativity", said SKEMA professor Francesca Melillo, in charge of this global seminar.

On the Brazil campus

To start their projects, the international students present at SKEMA Brazil, had a Design Thinking workshop with professor Juliana Travassos. In addition, they had a lecture with professor and doctor, Frederico Garcia, who is a psychiatrist and head of the Center for Research on Vulnerability and Health (NAVES), to better understand what the experience of a person with a disability and those who live with them is like. To put themselves in these people's shoes, students did an activity where they walked a block blindfolded.