This document is for IB coordinators, MYP Design teachers, and school administrators considering Catena for their students. It covers the delivery gap in MYP Design, the 2027 framework changes, and how Catena maps directly onto the criteria your students are assessed against.
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, optimized for your goals, and we measure our success by the same criteria IB does.
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 MYP Design curriculum is genuinely ambitious. It asks students to work through a complete design cycle, produce visible evidence of their thinking, make independent decisions, and defend them — all assessed against four published criteria.
None of that is a teaching problem. It's a time-and-setting one. Primary research, a visible evolution of ideas, and decisions a student can defend in their own words are built best in a studio, with a practitioner giving feedback in real time — using the AI tools professionals now work with natively. That's exactly the conditions a packed timetable and limited contact hours make hard to create. Catena isn't instruction your programme is missing; it's the reps there's rarely room for.
The Enhanced MYP framework, mandatory for all IB schools by September 2027, is the biggest revision to the MYP since 2014. It gives teachers more flexibility and puts greater weight on authentic inquiry and independent, defensible decision-making — exactly the habits professional design practice is built on.
In practice, the enhanced framework rewards exactly what design thinking trains: meaningful real-world contexts, concepts used as genuine thinking tools, and inquiry that drives independent decisions rather than compliance.
At the DP level, the 2027 Design Technology overhaul is even more explicit. The Internal Assessment now follows the design thinking process as a named framework, with new emphasis on usability testing, designing for real users, and defending decisions in assessment contexts.
The new guide builds the course on a five-stage design process it describes as a design-thinking model; the internal assessment is a design project in which students demonstrate "investigative, analytical, design thinking, design development, prototyping, testing and evaluation skills."
IB — DP Design Technology guide, first assessment 2027
Catena was built around this methodology from day one. Catena's methodology has aligned with these principles from day one.
Sources: IB — MYP curriculum & enhancement · IB — DP Design Technology guide (first assessment 2027) · IB — MYP assessment & exam schedule.
Without turning the studio into a compliance exercise, the work naturally produces what each criterion rewards — A Inquiring & Analysing through primary research with real users, AI-assisted synthesis; B Developing Ideas with structured ideation and AI-expanded range before narrowing; C Creating the Solution with AI-accelerated prototyping and iteration; D Evaluating through live practitioner critique — defend your decisions, not your prompts. Students leave with the evidence base assessors and moderators look for, built through the design process itself. Students also learn responsible, documented AI use inside a professional design workflow.
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, and the design process the IB's 2027 Design Technology guide now names explicitly — enhanced with the AI tools professionals now use natively. We apply it to your students' own project brief for IB Design — their problem, their user, their constraints.
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 moderation. The final session is a live practitioner Critique, with feedback in the room the way a professional design review works.
Your students know the criteria. Catena teaches them how to earn them.
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 DP and CAS coordinators: See the IB Diploma partner overview →