Design Days

We held five design sessions throughout the course of a year, where participants learned the art of design thinking, human-centered design, and worked on their prototypes focused on equity and mindset. Each design day was a mix of hands-on play, work, and learning, and each session had a particular goal in mind to make sure the Virginia Beach community was ready to present prototypes to a broad group of stakeholders in the beginning of June 2019.

These photos are from our third session with the group in mid-January. At this point, participants had been asked to try their hand at designing mini-prototypes as a way to get familiar with the design process. Then the group split up into their two teams: equity and mindset and started carefully working through what they wanted their big prototypes to be focused on. We used the Prototype Planning Template as our anchor. By the end of the session, the groups had started to chip away at a direction.

Do our solutions present an opportunity for alignment? Are they bold? Are they big enough to matter? What’s their feasibility? How will we measure they work? Is there enough interest in the group to pursue it? These are the questions participants had to ask themselves as they started pursuing prototypes.