Join Christian Villum, Director of Digital & Future Thinking at Danish Design Centre, a leading Danish organisation that empowers citizens and companies through design. REMODEL was originally a program for Danish manufacturing companies in 2018. In the introductory video, Christian explains how the program has been adapted to this free online course, so that any individual can learn about how strategic design can accelerate innovation processes. He explains the purpose of the course and how you will benefit from an open source approach. The featured video guides you through key aspects of the units, including the various phases, toolkits and key concepts that make up the REMODEL mindset.

Open source is a concept from the software world, which means that you open up your IP to engage with external stakeholders to become co-creators of your product. The value dimensions of going open source include: making participation easy, build on the knowledge of innovators, create customer goodwill, allow peer-peer support, reduce development costs, branding value, the ability to test ideas with users in the community early on and a high quality validation. This unit introduces the basics of open source principles by getting insights into some successful manufacturing companies who apply open principles already like OpenDesk. Examples show how going open can make up the foundation of a financially sustainable business strategy. By the end of this unit, you will choose a product that you will work with throughout the rest of the course. Watch Christian Villum’s video for an overview of the course exercises and how he uses the example of Lego Mindstorm to illustrate how to choose a product that you will work with throughout the course.

Have you considered how many user groups would interact with your product? By working on user stories, this unit dives into what your product would look like as an open source solution. The video and exercises in this unit guide you towards envisioning what it would look like if you open source the product from your portfolio that you selected in Phase 1 (or parts/elements of it). More specifically, you will reflect on who your most important users are and, more importantly, start envisioning what might motivate them to engage with your potentially open product in order to become co-creators. Watch the video by Christian Villum before jumping into the exercises. Remember that you will be using all the materials you have worked with through previous exercises for the following units in this course.

Welcome to Unit 4 of the REMODEL course. We hope you’ve enjoyed your engagement with the content and exercises so far. In this unit, you will transform one of the user stories you made in the previous unit into more detailed storyboards that describe the interaction users will have with your product. You will also identify key elements in that interaction and discuss how to open them. These open key elements work as cornerstones in open business models. If you haven’t worked with storyboards before, refer to the article “Storyboard” in the materials section. This will give you some background knowledge before you create your own storyboard in the exercises. Head over to Christian Villum’s video, where he dives deeper into user journeys and how to select a user story from the previous unit for the following exercises.

In this phase you will start to lay the foundation for establishing a community around your product by mapping your existing stakeholders, and then dive into imagining the full scope of the system around your product that this community will be part of. We call this the system map. The key purpose of creating a system map, is to reflect on and illustrate your business model.

This unit focuses on 2 interactions: reflection and feedback. In the original REMODEL program, participants engaged in a hackathon board game where groups came together to challenge assumptions and co-create ideas. For the purpose of this unit, we have iterated the board game into a series of reflection questions and a feedback exercise. The first exercise in this unit creates a space for you to reflect on the System Map experience you had in the previous unit. In the second exercise, your goal is to reach out to someone in your network to ask for feedback on your model. Receiving feedback and criticism on your model is an important aspect of the design approach because it makes you think about things that may seem obvious to you, but are not that way to others.

Congratulations, you have now reached the end of this course. However, this does not make the end of your REMODEL experience. In this unit, you will be asked to pitch your idea of an open source product based on all of the insights you gained through this experience. Hungry for more? We encourage you to move forward with your product by involving your co-workers and leadership team to take part in the community testing and hackathon simulation activities that are part of the original REMODEL toolkit on GItHub. You can access them via remodel.dk or head over to the materials section for a direct link to different toolkits.