Homelessness is a difficult experience many of us cannot fathom.

This past weekend, the City of Austin Innovation Team and Service Design ATX Meetup group hosted the Service Hustle for Homelessness, a three-day co-creation workshop with volunteer design professionals and people with lived homelessness experience in their present or past.…After Friday’s dinner of catered barbecue and a round of co-creation on key issues, groups formed around top ideas; I joined the team using the starter idea of “storage leveraging the city’s unused spaces.”

(originally published on Medium)

In a few short weeks, I will finish my master’s program at Parsons in Strategic Design + Management within the School of Design Studies. This is a blended “design methodologies with business applications” program, one of the first and few in the nation. Each class has stretched the traditional business courses — for example, instead of business economics, we took a current, broader approach and studied new economies (e.g. the gig economy) and global trends and impacts. 
 
This program wraps up in a year-long capstone project, in which we each select and solve for one wicked challenge. Through this process, several concepts I learned moved from class discussion topics to personal lessons.

"What are the top 5 metrics you’d track in a creative consulting firm and why? (Bonus points if you provide something visual that helps tell the story!)"

An interesting challenge, both from a business and visual standpoint. I accept.

Defining the success of creativity means putting structure to what inherently seeks to break and create new structure. Creativity requires cross-pollination and new insights, and it thrives in a place where goals are high and mental play is rewarded and protected. But the ultimate success...

The design thinking process is one method well-suited for approaching such challenges, especially when it is a user change that is needed; it is a user-centric process. For my thesis

...this summer, I had the experience to walk the front lines of conservation with a marine biology lab group off the Florida panhandle coast, observing and collecting data on endangered sea turtles nesting. A taste of where the rubber meets the road.

In early 2017, Snap, Inc. (the parent company of Snapchat) made an important decision in the life of its company and the social media field when it went public with its IPO. By doing so, it made the claim that not only was it a unicorn and disruptive force in the media industry, but it was here to stay. With its potential success and business sustainability, this company has the chance to join the ranks of disruptive innovators turned leaders…but will it?