The assignment 

There are 5 core stages of the Design Thinking sprint process, and they will form the outline of the Main Task’s structure for your commissioner: Amsterdam and Partners. You and your international team members will need to work through these stages in order to gather and develop ideas with a blend of structure and creativity. You can really go wild with coming up with a solution. No idea is too big, as long as the three main judging criteria mentioned below are met.  

Stage 1: Empathizing 

Use empathy to understand the design challenge set. 

Immerse yourselves in the challenge, get overcrowding/overtourism and its related issues into perspective and thrash out problems through thorough discussions tackling its related terms. 

Stage 2: Defining 

Narrowing down, organizing and clearly defining the needs. 

This stage will see you and your team members organize problems into groupings and drill-down in-depth on data and insights gathered from desk research and other sources gathered during the various programme-items of the ACEEPT Project Week. 

Stage 3: Ideating 

Intensive ideation, teams thrashing out ideas through thorough discussions on possible solutions. 

With extensive knowledge gathered in the previous stages, you and your team members will put all your ideas together, clustering and voting on those to take forward (intensive ideation). 

Stage 4: Prototyping 

Taking one idea forward and developing initial prototype concepts. 

You and your team members will select one idea to take into a prototyping stage to develop the idea intensively to show how your most valuable prototype concept(s) would look and function. Keep in mind: It's better to focus on one well-developed and convincing prototype concept, than on multiple but less developed prototypes.

Stage 5: Pitching: Final Presentations on Friday 

Teams pitch solutions to a panel of expert jury-members for voting. 

With a twenty-minute pitch slot (15 minutes presentation time and 5 minutes for questions from the audience) allocated to each team, the pitching begins. After the presentations, the three juries (expert stakeholders, students and teachers) separately discuss and decide upon the top-3 winners, who will be announced during the Closing Dinner on Friday night.

Please note: Within the above stages you are supposed to take one or more of the 11 formulated Strategies and Measures of the UNWTO-report (UNWTO et.al, 2018) into account, and – of course – you will have to motivate your selection. 

Every stage comes with a supported format-tool (appendices). 

Source/courtesy: The Digital Tourism Think Tank, (2018-2019).