Reflections on the Design Advantage

We wrapped up the second session of the eight-hour Design Advantage workshop with the UDI on Tuesday night.  The workshop was developed at the request of their U40 (under forty) group, to help them expand their toolkit for dealing with complex problems.  The issue of housing affordability is of particular concern to them, so we used it as the working problem for the session.

This was the first workshop I’ve co-developed and facilitated; I had the extreme pleasure and privilege of working with Professors Moura Quayle and Ron Kellett (UBC) and someday-to-be Professor Andreanne Doyon.  (We also had the support of our extraordinary Sauder d.studio student team).  It was an incredibly rich process for me and I believe that the final program was infinitely stronger than anything we would have produced individually.  It was actually a terrific example of design thinking in action, with multiple iterations and versions of questions, workbooks, presentations and strategies.

I learned a great deal – about getting out of our heads and onto our feet – as the participants were less keen on theory and anxious to get busy. This is always a struggle for educators.  We believe that novices need theory first before they could possibly be able to do anything.  Yet, novices repeatedly prove us wrong, as they are always smarter, more experienced and more resourceful than we think.

Many of the participants left feeling that they had developed good ideas for addressing affordability that they could continue to pursue – and that they did take away new skills and strategies for managing complexity.  Others left disappointed, as they expected to solve the affordability problem.  In future, we need to be more specific with our marketing.

In the end, 23 young professionals went from thinking about a massive problem – affordability – to prototyping five viable solutions to specific pieces of the problem.  Not bad for 8 hours work.

Kudos and thanks to all!