CLIENT: Design Gym

DATES: September 2014 & March 2015

COMPANY
The Design Gym is a creative agency that empowers people inside of organizations to break things, make things, and create dramatically better ways to work.

CHALLENGE
Coach professionals through Design Gym’s signature learning experience, the Studio Project, a multi-week workshop in which professionals learn human centered design while working with a real client to create a final deliverable.

APPROACH
Each Studio Project begins with the client proposing a design brief to the group of learners. For example, Viad’s guiding question was How might we create personalized and inspiring experiences for a new generation attending live events?, and Teach for America’s was How might we build excitement within the next generation to become teachers?

To kick-off the Explore phase of, I coached each group through establishing a knowledge base and defining assumptions. We then identified client-related expert and participant interview subjects 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 while they frameworked their interview findings. Frameworks explored included: clustering, tension spectrums, concentric circles, funnels, user journeys, and 2x2 matrices. I then guided the groups to create concise insight statements based on 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 to kick-off the Ideation phase, during which I coached the teams through rapid individual and group brainstorming to generate as many ideas (with and without constraints) as possible.

RESULTS
The final deliverable for the Studio Project was a set of recommendations delivered to the client via in-person presentation (aided by a visual designer). The Viad project focused on presenting major insights and ideas to explore, while the Teach for America presentation focused on major insights gleaned from the research and frameworking the team did. In each case, clients expressed a great deal of delight and satisfaction with the outcomes.