Workshops
I am an experienced workshop facilitator, who enjoys coming up with the right set of activities to meet a session’s goals. I have a knack for making people feel comfortable and do my best to encourage responses from all participants.
Before 2020, most of the workshops I facilitated involved flip charts, sticky notes, sharpies, and lots of moving around the room. Since the pandemic imposed social distancing, however, I’ve had the opportunity to conduct a number of online workshops, having to reconfigure how I do things in the age of Zoom.
I’ve learned a lot about what sessions work online and the limitations and advantages of collaboration software. While I look forward to getting back in the same room with people when it’s safe, I remain interested in virtual meetings, given the benefit of bringing together people who can’t, for whatever reason, gather in the same room.
Brand Strategy Workshops
A client developing a new program to increase abortion information and access for adolescents and was looking for branding guidance before making a pitch for funding.
A longtime design colleague and I partnered on a series of workshops—each taking on the session prep, facilitation, and write ups for half of the sessions. We initially proposed holding in-person workshops, but once the pandemic hit, we had to shift everything online.
Between August and October 2020, we conducted two brand sprints with the staff, two sessions with youth advisory board members, and two sessions where we brought together staff, youth, and invited experts from the field. All told, we facilitated 18 branding activities before synthesizing the findings and proposing two possible brand strategies. Our clients took one our brand ideas and are currently using it to pitch for funding.
Seen here are some screenshots of MURAL boards, a live Zoom session, and a page from the synthesis deliverable. The images are intentionally difficult to read because it’s an ongoing project seeking funding.
Human-Centered Design
Miro board prepped for HCD training exercise
For the past 15 years, I’ve spoken at a number of state and national conferences about technological innovation and how those advances might translate into the field of public health. Around five years ago, I started turning those sessions into part presentation, part hands-on workshop, when possible, so that participants could learn about the fundamentals of human-centered design and try out some of the methods themselves.
In addition to conference workshops, I’ve been invited to facilitate an in-person workshop with an office of federal employees within HHS and an online series of meetings with the staff of a consulting firm that wanted to train their employees in a broader range of research methods.
I design workshop activities so that participants can solve for a user need they likely experience themselves. For example, I asked the federal employees to redesign their commute to work and the consulting employees, many of whom travel regularly, to redesign the airport experience. This way, participants can offer real insights as they practice interviewing each other and synthesizing the findings.
In most cases, the expectation of these workshops is not that participants will walk out ready to carry out this type of work themselves, but that they will go back to their communities, their agencies, their funders and advocate for more human-centered design in the field of public health.