PREVIOUS DESIGN THINKING PROJECTS
I have worked on design thinking projects through my business Sustain Tomorrow, freelancing, and in grad school at Stanford with the following organizations. From solar powered amps to how women invest their money, bicycle generators to rock climbing design projects, chicken incubators to environmental justice, I love working on projects that have purpose. Watch the videos below to explore projects I’ve spearheaded and better understand my design process!
SUSTAIN TOMORROW
I founded a design thinking firm called Sustain Tomorrow that uses the power of collective creativity to fight climate change. Sustain Tomorrow provides pop-up innovation labs, expert design thinking facilitation, and consulting services to help companies quickly meet growth targets while fighting our climate crisis.
As the founder and CEO of the company, it’s been an amazing process of learning, visioning, wearing multiple hats, and growing. I constantly practice leadership and project management in this role. I hired and trained an interdisciplinary team of facilitators with backgrounds in design thinking, environmental science, renewable energy engineering, psychology, education technology, music, project management, and improv to bring the innovation labs to life. I also care deeply about bringing aesthetically pleasing design to the environmental space. I created a website and associated materials such as 2-pagers, case studies, and marketing materials for Sustain Tomorrow. To grow the business, I conducted empathy interviews with over 150 sustainability managers, energy consultants, philanthropies, and university professors around the world to better understand pressing challenges within the environmental sector. With a better understanding of the needs in this space ranging from packaging to gaining buy-in from leadership, I was able to develop tailored design thinking curriculum focused on sustainability.
#entrepreneurship #femalefounder #lgbtownedbusiness #womanownedbusiness #designthinking #sustainability #circulardesign #facilitation #esg #consulting #innovationlabs
DESIGN THINKING & SOLAR- ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
Solar has the potential to work amazingly. Costs have declined 80% over the past ten years and technology has become more commercially viable. Yet, we see solar is only 1.3% of the US’s total energy consumption. So what’s going on? We have the technology. We have the economics. What’s missing? What’s missing is the human component.
When I worked at Rocky Mountain Institute, I spearheaded a design thinking project called the Solar Procurement Framework, which was intended to help utilities successfully develop 1–10 MW solar projects. I interviewed over 50 utilities over the country to better understand their needs and motivations. Leveraging insights from these empathy interviews, I create a website focused on learning and community. The Solar Procurement Framework provides easy-to-use, step-by-step guide for utilities by outlining solar procurement steps, best practices, and access to resources. We also held workshops that allowed utilities to connect and learn from each other. Watch the video above to see how we used empathy to design solar with users in mind.
#solarenergy #utilities #distributionsolar #communitysolar #community #playbook #sustainability #cleanenergy
DESIGN FOR PARKINSON’S ACCESSIBILITY - POWER FOR PARKINSON’S
I partnered with Power For Parkinson’s– an organization that provides free exercise classes to Parkinson’s patients and caretakers to create a website and app for the organization. Watch the video to explore how we used design thinking to design for accessibility, community, connection, and physical and mental health.
#parkinsonsdisease #parkinsons # exercise #accessibility #uiux #webdesign #appdesign #innovationlabs #designthinking #health #caretakers #community
DESIGN THINKING LEADERSHIP- CU BOULDER
As the Chief Learning Officer for the CU Boulder’s Dean’s Leadership Fellows, I co-developed a design thinking leadership program for undergraduate students. This work involved creating a vision for the program that would allow students to grow over the course of their academic experience. To support this vision, I created interactive workshops for students in both in person and virtual settings, trained and managed a team of six facilitators, and developed tailored curriculum.
I co-designed a course called the Purpose Project, which consisted of 20 interactive design thinking workshops for CU Boulder Sophomores. I was a lead instructor for this course and trained a team of 6 facilitators to support the class. This course was an intensive, hands-on, project-based experience in which students applied design and business skills to create comprehensive solutions for challenges in the health, environmental, social sectors. We partnered 10 partners with various challenges in these sectors. Teams were created to allow students to empathize with users, define needs, ideate, prototype, and test ideas that can be implemented by partner organizations. Students presented their findings to partners. Ultimately, they helped move the needle forward on these pressing issues.
I also held storytelling workshops for juniors at CU Boulder. The purpose of designing and delivering these workshops was to introduce students to basic theory and practice for storytelling to encourage strong communication. This training will help students continue to build strong leadership skills, understand the basic principles of storytelling, demonstrate creativity and aptitude of creative communication, and prepare to use design thinking in future career opportunities.
After students were introduced to design thinking, in their final year, I wanted to teach them how to bring design leadership skills into their future workplaces through facilitation. In these facilitation trainings, students learned how to create safe, equitable spaces and practiced and received feedback on their leadership.
#designthinkingleadership #purposeproject #socialentrepreneurship #sustainability #designthinkingforhealth #undergrad #creativity #facilitation
SEE HOW WE CAN MAKE CLIMBING NON-JUDGMENTAL- THE NORTH FACE
How might we encourage more playfulness in indoor climbing gyms? North Face challenged my team at the Stanford d.school to explore this question. My team interviewed over 60 climbers of all levels and discovered beginners fear of judgment, which holds them back from wanting to attempt problems. Also, most climbers are driven by self-competition.
We used these insights as the basis of our design and The ZenPro was born. The ZenPro allows climbers to use GoPros to videotape themselves as they attempt a problem. The footage from their climb is then sent to them along with a personal record tracking their progress.
Additionally, the footage becomes part of a photomontage that can be displayed at local gyms. If ZenPro is carried out in all gyms across the nation, this project has the potential to create a the biggest photomontage of people: a photomontage of a creative, non-judgmental climbing experience.
MONEY MAKING THROUGH CHICKEN FARMING AND SOLAR ENERGY- ZOLA ELECTRIC
In Tanzania, many people have one unexpected thing in common… chickens! About 72% of households in Tanzania have chickens and similar numbers can be found across Africa. Chickens are relatively easy to keep, especially the local breeds that forage for food, and they provide a supplementary source of food and income. Many people farm chickens at a small scale and it is not uncommon for these small farmers to have impressive operations at home. But one thing that very few people are able to do for themselves at home is artificially incubate eggs due to incubators’ need for 21 days of uninterrupted power, which is rare on Tanzania’s power grid infrastructure.
At the Stanford d.school, we created Kukua, a solar-powered, low energy chicken egg incubator. Kukua has been designed to cut energy requirements over 50% when compared with low cost incubators on the market today, making it able to run entirely off one of Off-Grid Electric’s 50-watt solar panels and 180 watt-hour batteries. This will allow small-scale kienyeji farmers to incubate their eggs at home, rather than pay 500-1000 TanzaniannShillings per egg for space in an incubator at a local shop. The 30% increase in annual income from using a Kukua incubator can go towards paying for a larger, more powerful home solar system, with a 4-chicken farmer able to pay off a 90Wh system over the 3-year lease period from the increased profits alone.
#solarpower #cleanenergy #tanzania #chickens #incubators #businessmodeldesign #equity #accessibility #productdesign #servicedesign #designthinking
INVESTMENT PLATFORM FOR WOMEN- FIDELITY
When it comes to finance, there is overwhelming evidence that women invest less frequently than men. This problem drove a team of students at the Stanford d.school to answer the question: “How might we get women to invest more?” We empathized with men and women of all ages about why they do or do not invest and gained some interesting insights. We found women would rather invest in something they care about to feel they are making an impact, they do not invest as much as men because their friends do not talk about it often, and they are less risk averse.
From these insights, we chose to focus on building women’s confidence to invest in the things they cared about, which is where the idea for Color My Cause arose. Color My Cause is an app where an individual investor can see what causes they are investing in through associating colors with different causes. With social investment as the core of the project, Color My Cause allows people to see what social causes businesses supported alongside traditional indicators of success in the stock market. This platform would ultimately allow people to invest in what they are passionate about and make money at the same time.
Although this idea did not come to fruition, we tested our prototype on Fidelity, IDEO, and Google employees and received positive feedback.
#women #femaleempowerment #investing #socialcauses #finance #uiuxdesign #appdesign
