Katherine Ziff

Featured Presentation

Teams, Tools, and Trust in Facilitating Design Thinking

Each step of the design thinking process asks participants and practitioners to take risks, from sharing imperfect ideas to giving and receiving critical feedback. That risk-taking depends on an atmosphere of trust. Although design thinking resources are often customized for different audiences, contexts, time frames, and purposes, they rarely offer guidance for considering the impact of team dynamics.

This session offers insight into creating contexts where members feel comfortable being candid, moving past their first ideas, and taking risks to create innovative and memorable experiences. It will capture these ideas in a matrix to conceptualize ways that design thinking activities ask participants to extend their trust. It will offer practices techniques to develop teams’ trust and skill at collaboration from day one.

About Katherine

Katherine Ziff has many years’ experience facilitating design thinking activities and leading teams of design thinking practitioners in science centres and children’s museums in the United States and Canada. She has also taught design thinking courses in the Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation programs at Mount Royal University and brought design thinking practices to libraries, community groups, and innovative teams in municipal government. Her research applies a new materialist lens to understanding the factors that contribute to the function (and dysfunction) of design teams.