2026-02-26 · 4 min read
What I Learned at the HPI d-school
On rapid prototyping, interdisciplinary teams, and why being wrong early is the whole point.
The HPI d-school Foundations program compressed research, ideation, prototyping, and testing into a five-week sprint with an interdisciplinary team and a real-world challenge. The key lesson was simple: ideas only get interesting once they survive contact with real users.
Coming from software, the shift into physical computing — wiring sensors, debugging breadboards, building with hardware — felt like learning to code again from scratch. That discomfort turned out to be productive: it made fast iteration unavoidable.
Design Thinking stopped looking like a workshop ritual and started feeling like an operating system for learning quickly. The best ideas were never the first ones; they emerged after cheap mistakes, blunt feedback, and a few rounds of rebuilding.