Hey All,

Jenn and I are currently attending the Design Thinking Institute at the Nueva School in San Francisco.  I had the pleasure of attending a Phillies vs. Giants game at AT&T park on Sunday afternoon, albeit a loss for the home team, it was a great experience. BTW, don’t believe the rumors that AT&T park is nicer than Citizens Bank, it’s certainly a beautiful stadium, yet pales in comparison.  Today we kicked off the workshop with intros and a few improv exercises.  I admit I’m not a great actor, but it broke down a few walls and allowed each of us to open up a bit and engage one another.  The next step was a design thinking activity where each of us were paired up with a person we were unfamiliar with, interview each other and create an identification tool, that would allow others to identify that person much better than they would with a simple name tag.  And don’t for one second think that I didn’t consider pretending that I didn’t know Jenn, so each of us would end up looking like stars at the end of the exercise!  In the end I followed protocol, and it was actually fascinating to see the various end products that each of us came up with in under an hour!  Here’s a quick photo I took of some of the work that went intothe product.  My partner quickly identified some of my glaring attributes e.g. Technology, Education, Family, Hockey, Phillies and created a pretty funny name-tag for me (I wish I would’ve taken a photo of my creation…it was much cooler :-))

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any rate, it was a great exercise that helped us to understand that the design thinking process.  This snapshot sums it up nicely:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we began our “real-world” project which I’ll discuss more thoroughly tomorrow, so STAY TUNED!  Enjoy a few snap-shots I took of the what surrounds this beautiful campus.  Please forgive any formatting or grammar problems….I’m still on Philly time so it’s time for bed!