The Innovation Sprint was good practice! It was hosted from 7-8 pm by the Tribe Innovation company.
Our focus was on improving the mental health of college students.
We were briefed on the design process, and quickly jumped into brainstorming, multi-voting, categorizing, and creating. It was fun to bring along a friend, and show him the focus of our Customer Insights class as well as the Sustainability Inspired Innovation class. I enjoyed getting group members involved in breaking out of their comfort zones and writing down wild ideas on post-it notes to address the problem.
We eventually ended up coming up with campus-wide “themed-clothing” days. The idea was to have a school calendar that includes certain days like “Halloween” or “80’s.” And students could wear their costumes (if they wanted to) to participate in that day. Some of the benefits of this were inspired by memories from high school, where students participated in these days and often went above and beyond in really creative ways. From a user perspective, these days can help to serve as real community-building activities. It was quite funny to create a prototype of a person who might actually dress up in a funky way and come to class. If I could improve anything, it would be to further the process to demonstrate that the phases of the design thinking process are not independent, and can be reiterated many times.
Overall, it was great to practice the design thinking mindset on a Thursday night, and I brought a friend along too!
