Using Design Thinking to Solve Community Problems
The Community Project Leaders Program is an initiative led by the Department of Innovation and Business Engagement that focuses on bringing the community and St. Lawrence College students together. The objective of the program is to assist students in developing their employability skills and leveraging their experience for future employment opportunities. This year, the program has adopted the Kingston Mayor’s Innovation Challenge, focusing on two streams: The Dunin-Deshpande Smart Kingston Stream and the Public Sector Innovation Stream.
In collaboration with Career Services, The Innovation Hub organized a design thinking workshop to open participants' minds by asking them to solve challenges posed by the Mayor of Kingston's program. This workshop was led by one of our students and design thinking experts, Veronica Dogbegah. It was an interactive workshop with many activities that encouraged participants to spend as much time on the problem as on the solution.
The second objective of this workshop was to help those involved understand that design thinking is not just a process; at some point, we will have to think outside the box to address immediate challenges. The difference now is that we are conscious of our abilities to use design thinking and be creative with tools to be innovative. Some of the tools learnt include empathizing with the user, creating personas, stakeholder mapping, brainstorming, brain dumping, the wall of data, and the lean business model canvas during the ideation phase.
A picture showing students seated together working on an activity
We believe that the skills learned at the workshop will help participants apply creativity to their municipal challenge solutions to advance Kingston as a smart, livable, leading city where citizens and students can thrive.
Workshop facilitated by Veronica Dogbegah and Workshop Template created for subsequent events.