The Design Gym
Coaching Design Thinking
New York, NY
Design Thinking
September - November 2014 & March - April 2015
The Design Gyms teaches design thinking to individuals and companies to empower them to tackle their own challenges and create change. The Design Gym’s signature learning experience is the Studio Project, a multi-week workshop in which individuals learn design thinking while working with a real client. I have served as a design thinking coach for two separate Studio Projects: 1) an 8-week workshop with Viad, a live events production company, and 2) a 5-week workshop with Teach for America, a nonprofit educational organization.
In each case, the client proposed a design brief to the group of learners. For Viad, the guiding question was How might we create personalized and inspiring experiences for a new generation attending live events?, and for Teach for America it was How might we build excitement within the next generation to become teachers? It was the coach's job to guide participants through the design thinking process to arrive at a final deliverable for the client.
To kick-off the Explore phase of design thinking, I coached each group through establishing a knowledge base and defining assumptions. We then identified client-related expert and participant interview subjects to target and created discussion guides to structure the in-depth interviews to come. Each Studio Project participant was tasked with conducting several in-depth interviews to collect data that addressed the client’s design brief.
I coached teams through the Understand phase of design thinking while they frameworked their interview findings. Some frameworks explored include: clustering, tension spectrums, concentric circles, funnels, user journeys, and 2x2 matrices. I then guided the groups to create concise insight statements based off of key findings and tension points. These statements proved extremely useful to clients and served as a springboard for their own internal strategy discussions.
In the 8-week Studio Project, we used the insights statements created to jump into the Ideation phase of design thinking. In this phase, I coached the teams through rapid individual and group brainstorming to generate as many ideas (with and without constraints) as possible.
The final deliverable for both forms of the Studio Project was a presentation (aided by a visual designer) given to the client. The Viad project focused on presenting major insights and ideas that addressed those insights, while the Teach for America presentation focused on just presenting out major insight gleaned from the research and frameworking the team did. In each case, clients expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the outcomes, especially given the design thinking lens their design briefs were approached with.
