Jumpstart Your Design Thinking

A focused, free mini-course for science gateway teams ready to build more user-centered solutions.

Interested in applying design thinking to your science gateway, research portal, or digital research initiative? The Jumpstart Your Design Thinking mini-course can help. It's free, and it's offered virtually over three half-days.

Science Gateway – Research Portal – Research Platform – Digital Humanities Project?

The SGX3 program has foundational knowledge in supporting science gateways that specifically offer access to high performance computing and compute intensive research, but our sustainability trainings are valuable not just for those research platforms that self-identify as “science gateways” but any large-scale, research-focused, digital initiative that has the intention of widely sharing cyberinfrastructure, tools, data, or content, in the service of facilitating knowledge creation and sharing. (Sustainability Blueprint Factory Final Report, p.9)

Who Should Apply

Leaders and team members of any research-focused digital initiative — a science gateway, research portal, data commons or repository, online educational community, or simply "the website where our data lives" — who want a quick, structured introduction to design thinking before applying it to their own work.

What the Workshop Covers

Across the three half-days, teams engage in hands-on activities that help them frame the right problem and design for the people they serve. Working closely with peers and facilitators, you will:

• Define a clear problem statement — a focused, testable articulation of the challenge you're solving, not a finished solution but a grounded starting point.
• Build a user archetype that captures who you're designing for and what they need.
• Map a user journey to understand how people experience your platform today.
• Generate and develop solution concepts through structured ideation.
• Create early prototypes and refine them through peer and facilitator feedback.
• Learn from case studies and from other teams working through similar challenges.
• Learn how to access Science Gateways Center of Excellence (SGX3) consulting services and support resources.

• Leave with a flexible toolkit — methods, templates, and a repeatable design thinking process — that you can bring back to your team and keep applying as your project grows.

  Learn more at: https://sciencegateways.org/jumpstart