This overview is for IB Diploma coordinators, CAS coordinators, and school administrators considering Catena for their students. It covers where an independent design-thinking programme fits the DP — the CAS Creativity strand, the university-application portfolio, and the Approaches to Learning skills the programme is built on.
Catena is an independent design thinking programme for high school students in the GTA — where AI removes the technical friction. We work with small cohorts and partner with schools whose programmes align with what we teach. The school gets a practitioner-led enrichment offering it can point to — without having to staff it, schedule it, or build it from scratch.
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.
The Diploma sells university outcomes, and beyond the six subject groups every full-diploma student carries the core — CAS, the Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge — plus the Approaches to Learning skills that run underneath all of it. A practitioner-led design studio lands on three of those at once, for any DP student regardless of their subject choices.
Catena is built on the design thinking methodology developed by IDEO and Stanford's d.school — the same framework embedded in Rotman's MBA curriculum — enhanced with the AI tools professionals now use natively. We apply it to each student's own project brief — their problem, their user, their constraints — with a finished artifact at the end.
Sessions run in small cohorts of 4–6 students, with five sessions on their own project briefs. Students frame the problem with real user research and AI-assisted synthesis, ideate with AI-expanded divergent thinking before narrowing, build a prototype with AI-accelerated tooling, and refine every decision until the work holds up under pressure. The final session is a live practitioner Critique, with feedback in the room the way a professional design review works.
Where coursework documents a process, Catena builds the real thing.
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 a DECA-focused programme. See the DECA partner overview →
For MYP Design coordinators: See the MYP partner overview →