More than 40 International Relations Online students spent a whole week together in Berlin. 

The Center for Global Politics likes to experiment with new teaching formats. That´s why we had introduced a Design Thinking Workshop to our International Relations Online  in-house class last year. The concept of this workshop, which has been instructed by Petra Meyer from the German Software giant SAP, is quite simple: students are working on finding sustainable solutions to challenges in business and society that reflect what the community involved wants.

For this weeks' in-house class, we developed the concept further and combined the Design Thinking Workshop with a simulation on a UN Conference on Climate Change. As usual, the Simulation game had been instructed by our partners from Planpolitik, Björn Warkalla, and Simon Raiser. Whereas some students were acting as representatives of nation-states, trying to negotiate a resolution on green-house gas emissions, the students in the Design Thinking Workshop were taking quite a different, non- state-centered path. And whereas the UN conference was largely defined by methods of horsetrading, bullying and forming coalitions, the participants of the Design Thinking Workshop  tried to "think outside the box" and formulated strategies to break negotiation deadlocks on this important global issue. We definetely will carry the concept further.