This year started with a bang, or in our case a sprint. Our Design Sprint this year as with last year is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use. This year we have 10 disciplines, 5 days, 5 industry projects, 5 mentors, 5 industry partners, 175 students. We may not be on campus but we are online – with students, staff, mentors and our industry experts joining from around the world – in America, South Korea, Germany, Italy and Columbia. Our partnership with Brooklyn College continued with professor Veronica Manlow and her post graduate students joining us at 04:30 NYC time each day. |
Comments from our industry partners
Catherine Jobling – Chief Operating Officer at AllSaints The standard and ingenuity of the students at Herts has been really inspiring and what they have achieved in a week has been truly amazing and down to their appetite for hard work. Well done to them all. Their standard was at a very high level. Margaret Macleod – Director of Sales at Harris Tweed Hebrides Working with Design Sprint 2021 has been a pleasure for Harris Tweed Hebrides. Throughout the week the student teams skilfully explored and developed the project brief using innovative solutions to present their final ideas focused on place, community and sustainability values which are at the heart of our island-based Harris Tweed® industry.” The Revd Dr Richard Sudworth – Secretary for Inter-Religious Affairs and Interfaith Advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Georgie Morgan EA to the Chaplian to the Archbishop of Canterbury It was thrilling to see the imagination and creativity of the students as they produced designs for a space for prayer and reflection that could be inclusive and yet respect the integrities of difference. Coming to a decision on the best deign was extraordinarily difficult and a testimony to the energy and vision of the students. Steve Bennett – the co-founder and Managing Director of Woof & Brew We were delighted to be invited to take part in the Design Sprint event. I was impressed with the quality and range of the questions that were raised by the students working on our project and it was clear in the final presentations that our answers had been taken into account. The presentations were very professional and I was astonished at the amount of work that the students had undertaken in such a short period of time. They had clearly worked well together in their teams, despite the difficulties of having to do so “virtually”. Student comments I must say this has been the most remarkable experience for me since I’ve been in university, and really appreciate it because I got to step out of my comfort zone and learn more about an industry that’s very dissimilar to my course. And This has been such an honor, and sort of a life changing experience for me. This challenge gave me the push that I needed to start dabbling in UX/UI design, marketing, and graphic design. I taught myself the Adobe XD software in 2 hours this past week with no prior experience. I just want to say thank you for allowing me to participate in this, even though I’m a whole ocean away. Thank you for being such an amazing and supportive mentor these past few days. I literally felt like I was on Project Runway and Shark Tank at the same time. We made history by, as far as we know, being the only university anywhere in the world to do a project as ambitious as this. Link to the University news page https://www.herts.ac.uk/about-us/news-centre/news/2021/university-of-hertfordshire-hosts-world-first-global-design-challenge-for-students TAKE A LOOK AT THE 2019 DESIGN SPRINT |
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE INDUSTRY PARTNERS INVOLVED IN THE DESIGN SPRINT…