The Design Gym facilitated a fantastic interactive experience to help us rethink how we think—or more aptly put: Design Thinking. This is creative problem solving, and it is something anyone can learn! It didn’t take long for me to realize that this does take serious intention. Case in point: the Experience Arc. The Experience Arc takes Design Gym’s 5 E’s (Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend) to create a path to best solve a problem. How do we Entice? How do we get someone, or an organization, to Enter? And then how do we keep them Engaged? Do they then Exit? Is there a follow-up to Extend so that they remain Engaged or re-Enter? The 5 E’s are a model that can be used to look back and evaluate on an experience or event. Was the Entrance sufficiently exciting? Was the Extend personal? All of these questions are sub arcs that together, form a larger arc for the entire experience. The goal is to create a process rather than a one-time effort—a loop, rather than on a dot or pulse. The Design Gym presented this content in far better depth and excitement than I could ever hope to recreate—but it was a great introduction into design thinking and an exploration of creative problem solving.
