sLab Explorations: What Design Can Teach Business (& vice versa) with Nathan Shedroff

What can design teach the world of business? And what might business bring to design? With the business world finally focusing on innovation, design has become a new (if ill-understood) priority for managers and leaders. But the real innovation isn't the need for more products and services but to innovate what business, itself, means and how it functions. Nathan Shedroff is a pioneer in interaction and experience design and serial entrepreneur who now focused on how design and sustainability can inform and transform business as we know it.

Sometimes words are not enough to fully engage in the important conversations of our lives. The aim of the afternoon session is to deepen live and real-time visual communication skills through drawing.

You will learn simple techniques to communicate and create meaning with others. Together we will practice using hand-drawn visual icons and metaphors to create simple visual notes and wall-sized charts to map and discover meaning with others.

Facilitators

Ever wondered how to think like a futurist? It can be learned. We introduce basic premises, concepts, thinking skills & frameworks for rigorous imagining to help entrepreneurs, designers and changemakers to thrive in the face of uncertainty.

The following approaches will be used to develop a greater understanding of foresight:

  • Images of the future and the three P's – possible, probable, preferable
  • 4D foresight – difference, diversity, depth and design
  • Long range scenario generation through deductive forecasting
  • Games for change – playful structures for improvisation and applied creativity

Participants take away foundational concepts and methodologies used in Strategic Foresight and tools for immediate application in strategic conversation and other professional contexts

Foresight Critique with Stuart Candy. Photo by Greg Van Alstyne

Facilitators

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