How might we create a learning experience for 150 people that goes deeper than design thinking hype and post-its?
Due to the rising popularity of design thinking, clients often want 101 trainings or bootcamps for their employees. With TD Design Camp, my team completely refreshed how Doblin delivers these types of trainings. Our goal was to give each camper a substantive, nuanced learning experience of what human-centred design entails — showing everybody the rigour, discipline, and value of putting users first.
Every Friday for four weeks (plus one Saturday!), 150 TD employees came to Deloitte for 8 hours of hands-on learning and work. There were 30 teams (5 people per team) and 3 counselors (a 1:10 counselor to team ratio). Our client was Pathways to Education and we focused on coming up with ways to help them expand their reach from serving 5,000 students per year to 20,000 per year by 2025.
Over five sessions, campers learned how to reframe problems from the user’s perspective, conducted interviews with alumni of the Pathways program, felt their way through the art and science of analysis, created low-fidelity prototypes, and boiled it all down to a 7-minute pitch. The top 5 teams got to present to a panel of judges which consisted of leadership from Pathways, TD, and Deloitte.
Client
TD Bank
Industry
Financial services
Key words
Teaching, workshop facilitation, experience design
Additional team members
Ariana Shadlyn, Eleni Alpous, Mary Bulnes Vélez, Zahra Ebrahim
Press
TD Design Camp opens minds to human-centered problem solving for the bank
Project highlights
1
Learning how to let the baby cry — allowing campers to feel the nerves before conducting their first interviews and giving them space to do analysis on their own without counselors’ interference.
2
Realizing that we don’t need to be territorial about teaching the human-centred design approach to people. With the right level of detail and time, campers saw for themselves how to translate this mindset to their own work and what the limits of their abilities were.
3
Using thoughtful design touches to create a sense of ceremony and ritual to tie the experience together across four Fridays.
