What is a virtual design thinking workshop?
The conventional wisdom of design thinking says that we need to all be in the room together. Digital collaboration tools and methodologies can drive a more efficient and effective process. A virtual design thinking workshop allows participants to engage in an immersive creative process that addresses the three drivers of poor creative performance:
- Production Blocking
- Free Riding
- Evaluation Apprehension
The Trig team has been facilitating and teaching virtual creative performance methods since 2016. We continued to deliver virtual design thinking workshops for our clients without interruption or schedule slip during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown. Contact us to learn more about how we can teach your team these methods at your company!
Design Thinking Workshops bring your team together with Trig facilitators to accomplish two major deliverables:
- Set a baseline knowledge of Design Thinking for the group
- Introduce tools, frameworks, and strategies to maximize your team’s creative performance
Workshops are intended for larger groups of up to 30 participants that break out into smaller teams. They can take place over 3 to 5 days with a flexible agenda that takes into consideration your team’s schedule, and can be hosted virtually using digital whiteboard software. Each day, facilitators will deliver Design Thinking topics and organize breakout sessions as you explore, prototype, and build your way to a practical understanding of this pragmatic approach to new product development.
What will my team learn? The Design Thinking Workshops are broken up into six core Design Thinking topics that are the foundation of our process (see below). It was crafted for partnering with our clients and works great for taking an innovation journey along their side. The goal is to use our process as a starting point to build yours!
Innovation & Design Workshop
- 3 to 5 days of collaborative sessions
- Work through 6 topic modules
- 3 Facilitators
- Group sizes up to 30 participants
- Groups larger than 30 require additional facilitators
The Explore - Prototype - Build Process
EXPLORE
Discover the world of your stakeholders by immersing with fresh eyes. Identify customers, key influencers, and their respective personas. Research design inputs, competitive brands and market trends.
Define patterns of behavior, thoughts, and aspirations as well as opportunities that will set the strategic focus for your project. Generate and validate unmet needs relevant to the project scope.
PROTOTYPE
Conceptualize ways to approach your stakeholders’ challenges from different perspectives. This phase is all about quantity as you brainstorm as many ideas as possible that meet your project’s defined needs.
Filter attributes of your team’s concepts by what would ultimately delight your stakeholders. Early ideas will be synthesized and converged according to decision-making best practices.
BUILD
Develop core concepts to fit into the context of your stakeholders’ needs. You’ll be building out high level strategic guidance, translating needs to specifications, methods of prototyping experiences.
Produce your case for the most promising concepts to pursue with strategic stakeholder feedback. Set a north star for your ultimate design deliverables using refined experiential prototypes.
“Thank you Ty. It was such a treat to work with you and Andrew yesterday. Amazing how quickly two hours can fly by! Yesterday it became even more clear that we have much work to do in pursuit of the 10-year vision that’s been established. I love the concepts and tools that you shared with us and plan to spread those out to the rest of our team.”
— Wendy Tonker, Executive Director, Schoolhouse of Wonder
“Thank you, Ty and Andy! I count any day I learn more than my students as a good day. Today was a great day. With your fun and inspiring interactive approach, we moved their learning process from defining the problem to imagining the solution in one day. And they loved it!””
— Jonathan Rosen, Professor of Practice, Director Professional Studies at UVA Biomedical Engineering
Kelly Harrigan is an explorer in both her professional and personal life. Natural curiosity about the world fuels her to uncover the physical, cultural, and environmental forces that shape people’s lives. Connecting the seemingly unrelated dots to inspire new product opportunities is Kelly's sweet spot. While she's comfortable living in the fuzzy front-end, she strives to help others push their creativity threshold as well. At Trig, Kelly is responsible for leading customer research studies, organizing and facilitating ideation sessions, as well as pioneering brand new services with trend research and trend field trips.
LinkedIn
As a career industrial designer and innovation practitioner, Ty Hagler has managed hundreds of new product development programs through the process of opportunity identification guided to commercialization.
LinkedIn
