Pre-Conference Workshop: Applying Design Thinking to Recycling Right
Ignite the creative force in yourself and every person in your organization by making design thinking central to your everyday culture. Design thinking utilizes elements from the designer's toolkit, like empathy and experimentation, to arrive at innovative solutions. By using design thinking, you make decisions based on what program users really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. Design thinking creates better public experiences, which leads to increased engagement and growth.
During a highly-interactive workshop, participants will use the design thinking process to develop creative outcomes to the problem of how to get people to recycle right; all the while learning tools that will help:
- Gain confidence to tackle complex problems
- Grow deeper connections with others in your organization and your customers
- Actually build something impactful
- Learn how stories help to connect people and ideas
Facilitator: Stephanie Yong
Stephanie Yong is a design thinking specialist. She is the principal at Stephanie Yong Consulting, a consultancy that focuses on utilizing the tools of human-centered design thinking to help generate ideas, solve strategic problems and apply to community and social impact projects.
As a leader in her community, Stephanie’s previous work has been focused primarily on the startup sector. Stephanie served as the Director of the W. Brett Wilson Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence for 6 years, creating programs and resources, managing day-to-day operations, fund development and ensuring programming was valuable and impactful. Stephanie is also a lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business with a strong focus on entrepreneurship and innovation and teaching design thinking principles.
Stephanie’s work has allowed her to work with a variety of organizations such as the Smart Cities Challenge, the City of Saskatoon Mayor’s Office and the Downtown Bid, Lyft, Kreos Aviation and Sask Interactive. Stephanie has aided these organizations in understanding and creating new initiatives by reviewing and ensuring the problems and issues brought forward were accurate and focused and by applying design thinking principles to create solutions.
Stephanie has a BA in Political Studies and an MBA from the University of Saskatchewan. She has recently completed her ICD training and is a certified Corporate Director. Stephanie comes from a family of hard workers and her life motto is: the harder you work, the harder you can play.