Design Thinking Workshop

Have you ever had the chance to pitch one of your ideas to a company’s CEO? Technically that’s what Ad club did on Tuesday October 9th. Grand Valley’s Design thinking workshop came in with a specific goal in mind: to help our members creatively solve problems. It was a fun learning experience that explored a unique way to tackle problem solving.

The specific problem that we sought out to answer was: How might we effectively partner a brand with a cause? We then broke up into groups with a liaison from the Design Thinking Academy to answer this question.The fun part began we the students were instructed to “roleplay” with a Design Thinking Academy representative. We viewed this person as either a consumer or CEO to bounce ideas off of. The key to this activity was to follow the 5 steps of design thinking.

1. Empathize-Understand the company, consumer, products and services and
2. Define-find the problem, analyze the info you found, identify needs
3. Ideate-brainstorm ideas, bounce ideas off each other by using “Yes and”, diverge and converge
4. Prototype-storyboards, mockups, build your ideas into a workable draft
5. Test-roleplay, will the client like what you came up with? How do you improve your ideas?

This process is always moving, don’t be afraid to move through the steps fluidly. It is not a sequential process but a more parallel one. This gives more freedom to the creative process. Some combinations of brands and causes included Nike partnered with the Special Olympics, Hershey’s with African Wildlife Conservation, and Target with the homeless. Each group was effective in solving the question in some pretty creative ways. The Target group pledged to give 10% of each purchase to the homeless and the Hershey’s group came up with animal printed packaging and chocolate.

Overall it was a grand learning experience and a distinct and unique way of tackling problems. Thank you to Grand Valleys Design Thinking Academy and David Coffey for an excellent display and explanation of what design thinking is to our members. If you would like to know more about Design Thinking or are interested in applying, feel free to visit their website by clicking the picture below.