Above & Beyond
ct. In June 2018, I founded a Creative Community of Practice at NewWave in an effort to bring people together through design and creativity exploration. At the time, design was siloed in different areas of the company, so by creating this group to benefit all staff, the designers in the company had an opportunity to come together to create connection and share experience and expertise. Monthly lunch gatherings and quarterly fine art exploration events have been hosted regularly since its inception, and membership has soared to 100+ members with 15-20 participants at any given event. The reach of this group has slowly begun to expand to multiple campuses and has become part of the organization’s sub-culture.
In August 2019, I traveled to Toronto, Canada, with 3 colleagues in order to train to be trainers of the Design Thinking methodology for innovating better and faster across all job types. We work as a team to deliver these engaging, hands-on trainings for all staff, using the ExperiencePoint interactive platform and curriculum. In 2020, we will begin a community of practice for design thinking advocates across the company to come together and discuss what works well, what doesn’t, and how to infuse the culture with this human-centered approach to solutions that benefit our customers.
