Refresh Miami’s summer startup series kicked off with a partnership with Design Thinking Miami, a nonprofit that offers educational and community-building events centered around the creative problem-solving methodology. The Refresh event was just one of three parts to the design thinking theme — there was also a happy hour networker on Friday and a full day boot camp on Saturday. Refresh Miami’s startup series will follow with events on funding and launching and end with a demo day in September, said Peter Martinez, co-director of Refresh.
Startups and students — I was sitting with a row of interns from AdMobilize — packed the Miami Science Museum to hear Andy Hagerman, co-founder of The Design Gym, a New York City-based creative education company launched about three years ago “to empower people and organizations to create change.” He said what he has found is that a lot of organizations say they are innovative companies but they don’t really know what that means on a daily basis.
Through his talk and exercises with the audience, he briefly explained the stages of design thinking — examine, understand, ideate, experiment and distill — and how the methodology can be especially helpful to startups that need to get to market very quickly.
First off, understand you are not the smartest person in the room; design thinking is about learning about your customers’ wants and needs first-hand. Exercises in brainstorming and interviewing techniques asking open-ended question helped the audience understand some of the principles. Just the use of “yes, and” instead of “yes, but” can help get the ideas flowing, he said. There are places in the design thinking process for the “yes, but” people, but that comes much later in the process – in the close. “It’s about putting structure into the process… When the team says now it is time to close, that’s when you start bringing it in,” he said.
The design thinking process can last hours, months or even years; the important thing is to put the process in a time box, whatever the time line might be.
One of The Design Gym’s initiatives: Design Taco, a pop-up taco shop. Turns out the tacos and beer were just the bait to get different groups mixing it up.
Design Thinking Miami, founded by Jessica Do and Mariana Rego, holds regular meetups and workshops. Find out more at Design Thinking Miami.