IDEO CoLab Winter Fellowship

This Winter, I worked closely with IDEO CoLab staff, academic fellows and corporate fellows on design briefs that involved emerging tech (Blockchain, Machine Learning, AR, VR, etc). Myself and other fellows were split into teams of 4-5 people and completed two design sprints. On my team, my fellow academic fellows were Jared Johnson and Danielle Gyory. Adam Supino, Ivy Rivlin and Dave Martin were our corporate fellows. Each of us had an area that we were passionate about contributing with. Our team had a mix of programming, design and business expertise. We utilized a tech-led design process that still followed a research, prototype, test format. During our process, we built and tested physical and digital prototypes.

My team had two guides Gian Pangaro and Shuya Gong. They were very gracious in sharing their knowledge. Pangaro helped our team create a prototype with Photon and Processing, while Gong shared her knowledge of blockchain prototyping tools.  What I greatly enjoyed about my fellow experience was the amount of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Information wasn't siloed. If we had questions that other guides or others in the CoLab network were equipped to answer we could reach out to them. Other CoLab staff members that I was grateful to have help from were Jacob Waites for his sharing his visual design magic, Reid Williams for his Blockchain knowledge and Dan Elitzer for his machine learning expertise :D

Here are insights that are helpful to take into other projects:

Be open and listen a lot.

Be curious and be curious about not only your project but about your teammates. Before starting a project, take time to learn what are your teammates strengths and what skills they want to develop. It is a great way to discover how you can support one another.

Prototype rapidly and often. An idea that is shared and tested is better than one that is not.