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.”
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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.
Read MoreThe 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
Read More...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.
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