Edona Elshan, Assistant Professor at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation, together with colleagues from four different universities across Europe, has received an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership grant for the project Design Thinking for Artificial Intelligence (DT4AI).
Building on eight semesters of hands-on DT4AI courses—featuring 40 real-world projects and approximately 240 students—developed at St. Gallen and Liechtenstein, the project will equip educators with ready-to-use materials: lecture slides, teaching notes, case studies in manufacturing, finance, and healthcare, short video “nuggets,” and an online access hub. These resources will be designed to help instructors integrate human-centred AI innovation into existing curricula.
DT4AI is a collaboration between the University of Liechtenstein (coordination, manual & material design), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (piloting, human–AI interaction, low-code integration), Aalto University (pedagogical design, video production, case-study development), University of Münster (ERCIS) (design-science research, network outreach), and Bern University of Applied Sciences (associate partner, scaling DT curricula, software engineering).
Core Activities of the DT4AI project:
- Programme Manual & Benchmarking: Synthesize best practices and map 15+ master’s-level innovation courses.
- Content Development: Create 30+ modular teaching units, 3–4 industry cases, 30 short videos, and standardized templates.
- Piloting & Refinement: Co-design and test prototypes with 40+ educators across 4 institutions to ensure usability and curriculum fit.
- Dissemination: Launch a digital access hub, publish white papers, present at major conferences, and host “Innovation Breakfasts” and KINTalks to build a pan-European community of practice.
By marrying Design Thinking’s user-centred ethos with AI-driven problem solving, DT4AI empowers educators—and, through them, a new generation of T-shaped professionals—to drive sustainable, human-centred digital transformation across Europe.
