BEYOND PROFIT: A Think + Do Series for Courageous Entrepreneurs from Creative Santa Fe, Santa Fe Innovates, and UNM Anderson School of Management will return on Friday, February 3rd with a new workshop on human-centered design—a versatile problem-solving toolkit with empathy as its cornerstone. The BEYOND PROFIT series kicks off its 2023 programming with this free, hands-on, three-hour workshop, entitled “Design Thinking for Start-Ups.” The session, hosted at UNM Rainforest Innovations in Albuquerque from 10AM to 1PM, will empower participants with a set of concrete tactics to enable them to deliver more satisfying and loyalty-building experiences to their target audience.
Building a vibrant and thriving business, or a community of any kind, requires deftness in navigating through complex challenges that naturally arise from competing interests and resource constraints. Tackling these issues strategically and compassionately has the potential to improve the lives of those around us, while also (not coincidentally) yielding greater profit. However, there are a few common factors that can stand in the way of entrepreneurs incorporating human-centered design into their business model. It’s easy, for instance, to be so in love with our “big idea” that we lose sight of its context, or of the living, breathing humans we wish to serve. And amid the hustle of daily life, it may also feel like an unaffordable luxury to stop, reflect and potentially devise more thoughtful approaches to our work. This workshop will demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be.
Creative Santa Fe (CrSF) Strategic Designers Gray Garmon and John Ravitch, leading voices in the entrepreneurial design space, will present a lively overview of human-centered design (as it pertains to start-ups and business stewardship), and an interactive exercise in applying the tenets to a relatable, everyday scenario in our lives. Participants need not be professional designers to employ and benefit from human-centered design practices—the term “design” here simply means being deliberate in one’s approach to meeting a need or solving a problem. “Anyone who ever made a choice and went after it is a designer,” says CrSF Executive Director Sorakamol Prapasiri. “How elegant the outcome depends on how skillfully we go about it. Seen in this light, design is a skill we can all get good at. Creative Santa Fe is excited to bring this problem solving approach to the BEYOND PROFIT series. What could be better than to build our community capacity to deliberately design a brighter future, together.”
So whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business owner, a community leader, a professional or simply curious about the human-centered design approach to problem-solving, reserve your spot at this workshop to learn how to build your profitable enterprise, founded on empathy, curiosity, and collaboration.