This document is for DECA chapter advisors, school administrators, and department heads considering Catena for their students. It covers the scoring change that most chapters haven't addressed yet, the evidence behind Ontario's ICDC performance, and what students leave the programme with.
Catena is an independent design thinking programme for high school students in the GTA. We work with small cohorts, optimized for your goals, and we focus on the skills that separate a forgettable DECA presentation from one that places, using the AI tools professionals now build with natively.
Catena is led by Vladimir Lukic, a designer with twenty years in the industry — most of them spent being the only one in the room arguing for the user. He spent seven years as Senior Product Designer at Audiobooks.com, leading design across a subscription platform on iOS, Android, and web, and eight years before that as Creative Lead at George Media, where he built and ran design systems across a portfolio of publications. He was doing e-commerce and subscription UX at Simply Audiobooks back in 2006, when the field barely had a name. He has designed large-scale systems for the Ontario Ministry of Health, cut his teeth in global advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi, and run his own studio. Along the way he has led design teams and spent years learning how to champion design in rooms full of stakeholders, vendors, and executives who didn't always see the point — across sales, marketing, and business development — without losing the love of the work that brought him there in the first place. He holds a Design Management credential from George Brown College and a Project Management certificate from the University of Toronto. He was invited back to George Brown as a thesis judge, evaluating graduating design students' work across multiple years. Your students aren't getting a workshop — they're getting two decades of knowing what happens when design is done right and what breaks when it isn't.
For 2025–26, DECA replaced the 10-page written paper with a 20-slide pitch deck across six events. For 2026–27, they went further: the written entry and the presentation are now equally weighted at 50/50, and all evaluation forms now include a standardized section on presentation technique. The deck is no longer supporting material — it is half the score.
Structuring a slide so the argument lands — and using AI tools to iterate on it ten times faster — is a design skill. That's what Catena adds.
"DECA just made the presentation half the score. Most chapter prep still focuses on the written entry. The students whose decks make the argument for them are the ones the judge remembers."
Catena — DECA Guide 2026-27 analysis
Ontario chapters have been outperforming their share of the field for years. The students are already serious. Deck-thinking instruction is the delta between where they are and where they could be.
Ontario at ICDC 2026: 91 of 620 ranked finals placements, 12 first-place finishes, and a finals presence in 44 of 62 events — about 3× the placement rate of the field per member. Counted directly from DECA's official ICDC 2026 Consolidated Winners.
Ontario students are already placing across nearly every event in a 292,000-strong competition. The students are serious, and the chapters are strong. What changed is the format, and that is where Catena fits.
Sources: DECA Inc. — High School Division (292,000+ members) · Ontario DECA (15,000+ members) · ICDC 2026 Consolidated Winners.
Catena is built on the design thinking methodology developed by IDEO and Stanford's d.school — the same framework Jake Knapp codified at Google Ventures as the design sprint — enhanced with the AI tools professionals now use natively. We apply it to your students' own project brief — their problem, their constraints, their deadline.
Sessions run in small cohorts of 4–6 students, with five sessions on their own project briefs. Students frame the business problem with real user research and AI-assisted synthesis, ideate with AI-expanded divergent thinking before narrowing, build the deck with AI-accelerated prototyping, and refine every slide until the argument is airtight. The final session is a live practitioner Critique where the student defends every choice the way a DECA judge will, before it counts. They leave with a punch-list and a competition-ready deck.
Which events. Catena fits the events where a student owns a designed argument: the five pitch-deck events (Innovation Plan, Start-Up Business Plan, and Integrated Marketing Campaign Event, Product and Service), the prepared written events with a presentation, and the presentation half of any series or team event. It does not drill role-plays or prepare students for the exam. Your chapter already does that.
The presentation is now half the score. It is the half most chapter prep leaves to the students.
If any of this sparks questions or you'd like to talk through the details, I'm always happy to connect.
contact@catena.coursesWe also run an IB Design programme. See the IB partner overview →