JORDANA GLOBERMAN DESIGN
Role - Design Lead & Facilitator
I designed original workshops for the festival and facilitated them over the course of several days during the festival.
Team
Me + 1 designer.
We partnered with a sponsor, 3M, as well as leadership for the festival. Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company, Stephanie Mehta, hired me directly.
Context & Approach
Fast Company's Innovation Festival is a nearly week-long creative experience in Manhattan's core that exposes participants to the biggest names in business, design and culture. Over 10,000 participants attended the 2018 festival. They came for more than keynotes; interactive workshops and open studios are also a huge draw for attendees. I was asked by Editor-and-Chief of Fast Company, Stephanie Mehta, to lead a series of hands-on workshops throughout the festival, aimed at coaching participants in creative team-building and collaboration.
Tools
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Coaching & Development
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Capacity building
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Co-design
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Appreciative Inquiry
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Sketching
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Affinity Mapping
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Gamification
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Collaborative Play
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Storyboarding
The workshop we designed was concise. We only had 45 minutes to run people through activities. These participants were successful individuals from diverse sectors of business, so we needed to keep the activities engaging and useful.
We started with a skills assessment, asking participants to identify their super-hero trait. These needed to be grounded in real life. While playful, this allowed teams to quickly assess their area of expertise and identify those of their peers. Next, we uses collaborative play and gamification to encourage teams to build strategies for uniting diverse skillsets in one initiative. We asked participants to form teams based on their unique super-hero traits. Next they would have to work together to do the impossible: prevent the great bagel heist of NYC.
Using giant post its and thier unique abilities, teams designed fanciful approaches to saving NYC from a dearth of bagels. Participants really got into the task and used play to help them explore real life possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Result
Participants from diverse industries found surprising ways to work together. Several participants said the workshop was the highlight of their festival experience. The workshop allowed them to forge new and lasting relationships with other participants and gave them skills that they were then able to bring back to inspire better collaboration in their respective places of work.