Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) is a great place to kickstart creative thinking. I knew little about International Creativity Week or Day but the workshops sounded interesting, and the price ($20) was totally awesome. Plus they were promising free sandwiches and cookies. What did I have to lose?
How can you not be energized by this amazing building on stilts? I actually got to ride up the elevator to the top of the box on stilts, and stroll through the industrial design studio space on my way to the workshop. Bonus!
First workshop was "Admit it. You're a Designer!", led by Jules Goss, chair of the Industrial Design Program at OCAD. [And Graham Hufton of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute]
The workgroup I was in generated a wonderful list of possible design problems to solve using design thinking, which kind of represents a zeitgeist of this moment in time for this group:
- Replace the styrofoam meat tray
- Pollution
- Commuting
- Information overload
- Enjoying your digital photos
- Real sizes for real people
- Green food supply
- Paint that changes it's own color, or other solutions to avoid needing to paint
- Guns in schools
- Workplaces designed for moms
- Understanding new technology
- Security process at airports
- Baggage pickup process at airports
- Size of print on all packaged products
- Better label for the segment currently called 'seniors'
And the one we decided to work on: A cell-phone designed around the needs of 70-somethings who don't currently use cell-phones, but might like the benefits they offer. There's our team of wanna-be designers.
So what did I learn? That design thinking is really a pretty natural structured process of defining a problem, and the parameters of a good solution before creating a lot of ideas and possibilities:
- Problem Definition
- Research / Context
- Ideation
- Evaluation
- Development
- Output / Resolution
followed by validation of the solution in the market, testing, iteration, and cycling back to Step 1.
On to the next event, where the very high-energy coach Warren Coughlin helped us tap into our inner entrepreneur in Create The Entrepreneur.
Warren's main message: "If you want to HAVE more, you have to BE more and DO more," expressed as the formula, BE x DO = HAVE. Warren says: "What you have right now is a function of who you are right now, and what you do right now."
Perhaps familiar to you if you have ever tapped into the well of motivational literature, but I liked it. What's more, I left the room feeling re-energized, and with a renewed sense of determination to follow through on things I want to make happen.
Life Lesson
I left the evening speculating about how wonderful my city would be if everyone was involved in something like this on a regular basis.
