Design Gym – Design Thinking Workshop Review

At Aumcore we are always sharpening our tools in order to bring the best and brightest ideas to life in viable services for our clients. Based in New York, we have a plethora of amazing workshops to choose from. We recently participated in a Design Thinking Workshop hosted by The Design Gym ™ and wanted to share what we learned with you.

FIRST: WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?

“Design Thinking is a creative problem solving method and mindset. It’s human-centered, iterative, and collaborative. By using empathetic research techniques, creative brainstorming skills, and rapid prototyping techniques, Design Thinking leads to more interesting and effective ideas.” – The Design Gym.

If you’re a regular blog visitor, you’ve probably heard us mention #AumThink before, and Design Thinking plays a big role in that process. It’s important not only to view the matter at hand, but to also consider all the factors surrounding a given project. There are many stages to accomplishing marketing goals, and we take pride in our process of passion, strategy, research and results.

SECOND: HOW DOES IT WORK?

As a part of our #AumThink process, we found Design Thinking fascinating, and absorbed the process offered through the Design Gym training. Here’s how it works. When creating a service or product these five phases are used to “design” the outcome.

Five phases of Design Thinking as articulated by the Design Gym ™

1. Examine: Dig into the problem, look into the industry, the context, and (most importantly) the people involved.

2. Understand: Go deeper and find patterns. Establish open questions to build on.

3. Ideate: Have lots of ideas, good and bad. Don’t stop at the obvious or the impossible.

4. Experiment: Try some things out. Make some things. Fail cheap and fast.

5. Distil: Strip your solution down to the essentials and tell the story to others.

THIRD: HOW DOES THIS AFFECT THE BOTTOM LINE?

By creating products and services and presenting them in a way that taps into the underlying needs of your customers, you can build brand loyalty. That’s the bottom line of Design Thinking, and part of the core values of #AumThink. Brands are often viewed as a “person” rather than a “thing” by customers:  Aumcore helps you personalize your brand and make it “human” so that it has staying power with your core customers, creating an emotional connection.

That sums up another fun learning workshop for us, and another takeaway for you! Are you active in your local marketing community? Let us know which events you find most helpful in the marketing journey, and what you’ve been able to implement into your marketing strategy.

BONUS FUN FACT

At the Platform Innovation event, the coordinators collected questions from the audience for the panel by instructing the audience to tweet their questions to “#platforminnovation” creating a unique buzz on twitter for the hashtag during the event, eliminating the need for microphone passing, and allowing the presenter to take only curated questions. Have you utilized Twitter as a solution for panel discussion?