Context

Many countries in the world are recovering from a substantial recession period due to the pandemic. Hong Kong’s authorities rapidly responded with one of its most important assets, technology. Thanks to multiple platforms and services developed in response to COVID-19, Hong Kong has one of the most successful approaches globally, with often 0 daily local cases.

The lessons learned from the pandemic are numerous, and we’re still adapting to many new norms. Perhaps one of the most important lessons is — to embrace change. Every industry has been and will continue to be affected or benefited by this situation. As a strategic designer, it has been interesting to navigate vulnerability and interpreting opportunities in every challenge. Luckily, I can work in a company tackling the high demanding request for more resilient and prepared talent in Asia.

I work for a Hong Kong-based company called Xccelerate. The company was founded with the intent and vision to solve the human capital development challenges in the world. As head of service design, my role is to ensure our platform and products have consistency when delivering an end-to-end experience for our multiple customers.

For this article, I will only focus on one of our core business platforms — Xccelerate Courses. I will explain our other products in future posts.

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Redefining education

Xccelerate Courses are a series of boot camps focusing on tech development disciplines. Every course lasts 16 weeks and is offered in a hybrid flex mode. There are no prerequisites, every background is welcomed, and we guarantee to prepare our students for work. In our own words, we focus on outcomes and deliver results from education to employment. The courses we offer are:

• Full-Stack Web development

• Data Science & Machine learning

• Full-Stack UX Design Immersive

Aside from my leadership role with the design team, I also serve as lead instructor for the Full-Stack UX Design Immersive course. Currently, our team is complemented by three design mentors; they also do research, generate strategies and design for our platform and products.

In 16 weeks, we need to ensure our students are competent in UX, acquire excellent UI skills, and, most importantly, be thinkers before makers. In other words, outstanding designers.

Our learning environment is hybrid. Students can come in person or join our classes remotely; our platform enables us to deliver the same experience level, both digitally and physically. However, our point of differentiation and most significant asset is our flexible framework.

To provide the best service possible, we combine different processes and creative models. We work with a strong foundation in design thinking, lean UX and agile. Additionally, we adopt a service design approach to generate a sustainable and scalable business model. We apply this workflow to our internal products and learning process for the students. Since day one, our goal has been to prepare our customers to work under strict deadlines, complex design briefs and multiple stakeholders. The combination of these factors and requirements helps us formulate and improve our approach to deliver superior outcomes.

The responsibility that comes with this challenge is exciting. I joined Xccelerate in April 2021; since then, we’ve run three cohorts, shaped 35+ talented designers, and worked with more than 20 clients.

Approach

Working with clients from various industries enables our students to get working experience as part of their learning process. Fortunately, the companies we offer pro-bono work are developing solutions tackling some of the biggest challenges in Hong Kong and the world today.

Some of the projects we’ve developed with our clients are improving mental well-being at work, tackling ocean pollution, circular economy models and cryptocurrency platforms, to name a few. These industries represent a significant impact on the future of humanity. Our students are prepared with resilient mindsets, cross-disciplinarity and constraints that boost their creativity.

The students complete six projects during their boot camp; 4 of these are client-based projects. Except for their capstone, every project is planned, executed and presented to clients with a 2-week time frame. We define a realistic scope of work so the students can deliver high-quality prototypes and valuable artefacts from their design process.

The final capstone project lasts 4 weeks (2 sprints), and the students have the right to choose from a portfolio of clients the type of challenge that will present them to the job market. Time management and strategic thinking are essential for the students to deliver excellent results.

As mentioned before, we use a service design approach and principles to work on our client projects. Multicultural and multidisciplinary diversity in group collaboration is deeply rooted in our workflow with the students. We leverage everyone’s background in every phase of the project.

Moreover, the collaboration does not stop when we finish the projects. The clients often work so well with our students that they offer them an internship or full-time job. This system enables us to accomplish some of our most important metrics as a company; well prepared and resilient talent, end-to-end job placements for our students, and systemic change through design solutions for real-world challenges.

Outcomes

As a designer and member of this company, it is fulfilling to see different levels of impact. We are preparing our students for an uncertain future. They learn hard skills but also soft skills to be decision-makers in their careers. At the same time, we intend to generate awareness and interest to solve complex problems through and by designing tech-based solutions.

Masahiro Mori is a Japanese roboticist; in his book ‘The Buddha in the Robot’, he mentions the only way to influence human behaviour today is by creating technology that influences us back. He invites everyone to develop technology that improves life on earth for all living species.

Therefore, instead of focusing on Human-Centered Design, we aim to deliver solutions for Life-Centered Design. That is the only way forward in our current world scenario.

At Xccelerate, we’re taking this into account. We have an immense responsibility to train our students with the goal in mind to generate systemic change. Luckily, we see a lot of companies in Hong Kong and the world developing exceptional work for the same purpose.

For the time being, our cohorts will continue this collaborative framework. We are building products for our hybrid ecosystem to connect talent with demand; Xccelerate Courses is just the beginning of our plan. We’ve already launched a job board and mentor-led platform to keep delivering the best outcomes possible to our customers. I will explain these two products in the following articles.

Moving forward

In conclusion, education today needs an iterative and creative process, just like every design project. As a company, we’re aiming to reinvent how knowledge is transferred and put into practice. We strongly believe that our students can develop critical thinking and technical skills for the world’s market demands and complex challenges.

Designing designers is a meta concept. It is grounded in my personal design agency; shaping the next generation of changemakers is a passion which I pursue responsibly and with enormous gratitude every day.

Please take a look at some of the results and portfolios we contributed to shaping. The credit stays with the talented designers that trusted Xccelerate and our framework.

1. https://www.warumstudio.com/

2. https://www.michidux.design/

3. https://derekisop.com/

If you wish to learn more about our platform, please visit www.xccelerate.co. Thanks for your time reading this article.