Workshop - Services

We offer training services to facilitate dynamic processes of thought within your organization and to teach tools essential to understanding the community that you serve. Our sessions will prepare you and your staff to integrate design-thinking principles into your daily work, capitalizing on your existing (human) resources and advancing approaches to community engagement. Services offered:

Ideation Session

We can create, plan, and facilitate brainstorming sessions that utilize and demonstrate the way design thinking assists in daily challenges. We recognize that your organization has the built-in resource of staff with expertise in your field. Our sessions provide strategies and exercises to maximize this resource by stimulating staff to continually rethink approaches to their work and community. The results are self-motivated and creative employees who will diversify their approach to daily challenges, and can continue to utilize the tools we have taught long after the training sessions are over.

Innovation Workshops and Training

Understanding the needs of a community is essential to keeping your services appropriate and relevant to them. Our workshop series begins with the basic principles of design-thinking and extends to the process of co-designing with stakeholders. Each session offers tools for understanding and engaging with community for the most constructive result. The skills we teach in these workshops will not only help your team become more creative problem solvers, it will empower them to pass along the new knowledge to colleagues.

Workshops can be organized and held at your organization for staff or individuals and groups can sign up for existing workshops hosted by Skillshare. Non-profits, start-ups, social entrepreneurs, designers & non-designers all can benefit from one or more of this series. Current Workshop Series:

Design-Thinking Basics

This workshop is a highly energized, interactive class that introduces new methods for brainstorming and problem solving. You will learn the basics of empathetic research to better understand who your community is, their real needs and behavioral patterns. In addition, you will learn the essentials tools for team-designing/co-production with colleagues, clients and community members, and efficient processes for narrowing down ideas in a positive, productive way.

Grassroots Design Research

How well do you understand the community and/or clients you serve? This workshop provides strategies and tools for engaging with your community/client base to learn their real needs versus perceived needs. You will learn the basic ethnographic techniques to test your assumptions through observation, how to build surveys, how to conduct interviews and how to engage in learning activities with your community.

Finding Your Influencers

How do people make decisions? What influences your clients/community? In order to best serve a community or client base it is essential to understand the primary and peripheral influences that shape their decision-making processes. In this workshop we teach tools to gain insight into your audience’s behavior and how that can guide your service model to best serve them. You will learn how to identify those influencers and create opportunities through client and community partnerships.

Co-designing with Stakeholders and/or Community Members

Team members and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives to the design process. Gaining tools to integrate myriad perspectives, agendas and priorities will be an invaluable skill as you refine your product/service for your client/community. In this workshop you will learn a variety of activities to brainstorm new ideas with and elicit feedback from the various players involved in a participatory design process. Facilitating participation in the design process will invite greater investment of stakeholders and community members resulting in a more effective product/service for your client/community.

To learn more, take a look at our case studies