Design Jams
Interested in participating in a design jam? Fill out the interest form and we’ll contact you with more information!
What’s Design Thinking?
What’s a Design Jam?
What’s special about Wish for WASH Design Jams?
What’s Design Thinking?
One of the simplest ways to understand design thinking is to think of it as human-centered problem solving. It is a process for tackling real world problems which requires empathizing with the people who are actually facing this problem – the users – and then working with the community to design culturally-embedded sustainable solutions. This process also includes observation, research, prototyping, testing, and lots of iterating based on physical constraints and user feedback.
What’s a Design Jam?
A Design Jam is a rapid sprint through the design thinking process where participants will go through all of the phases of a design challenge in a condensed period of time.
Working in teams, participants will be introduced to a design challenge, learn about the scope of the issue, conduct empathy interviews, brainstorm innovative solutions, produce drawings, sketches, and physical prototypes, and finally pitch and receive feedback about how well their ideas meet user needs.
What’s special about Wish for WASH Design Jams?
In a Wish for WASH Design Jam, participants will work with current and former Georgia Tech students as they guide you through the process of human centered, empathetic design. We will use this innovative design thinking approach to address one of our modern world’s biggest problems: water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH).
W4W uses a design thinking methodology known as CLAP which stands for Connect, Learn, Apply, Pitch. This process is specifically designed for design thinking beginners and places an emphasis on empathizing with diverse users as well as rapidly prototyping solutions based on that practiced empathy. The CLAP process also recognizes the importance of continued human-centered engagement throughout product or service iteration, refinement and scale up.
Over the past 4 years Wish for WASH has been running design thinking workshops and courses with partners such as OpenIDEO, The Paideia School, The Weber School, Girl Scouts of Atlanta, and the Museum of Design Atlanta as a part of our educational and advocacy workstream. Through our workshops and curricula we seek to empower the next generation of STEM learners, design thinkers, and human-centered problem-solvers to use empathic, interdisciplinary and iterative tools to build sustainable and inclusive innovation in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to help the world reach the 6th Sustainable Development Goal by 2030.
