This blog was written by Year 3 Fellows and Challenge 6 Project Coordination Leads, Kenny Andejeski and Ezekiel Harris. 

And just like that, we’ve crossed the finish line. We’ve made it through six grueling Challenges having partnered with influential organizations all over the 143 square miles of Detroit. From an outside perspective, it may have seemed like a series of five-week sprints, but in reality it has been a year-long marathon. Going into this year, only one of us had successfully run a marathon (shout out to Sarah Robb!) and, leaving it, only Rachel Rosenbaum has joined her on that list, but it’s safe to say that each of us have developed our fair share of grit and perseverance over the past 10 months.

For this final challenge, working with our sixth nonprofit partner, 8 Mile Boulevard Association (8MBA), our fellows were spilt into teams of 7-8 people representing four distinct geographic regions along Detroit’s stretch of 8 Mile. Their task, conduct a needs assessment for businesses along both sides of 8 Mile for the purpose of developing a strategic approach to comprehensive economic development in the region. In these large, teams communication, delegation of tasks and a willingness to cooperatively work would be essential.

For anyone who has run competitively before, you know that the end of any race really brings out the extremes in individuals. It’s where competitors emerge, training is put to the test, bodies give out and some people just give up. In our unique world of short-term human-centered design consultation, this translated into staying engaged in the process and producing deliverables that matched or even exceeded our prior work. Both Project Coordination Leads, with the shared experience of captaining our respective athletic teams in college, realized going into this final challenge with 8MBA that keeping everyone centered and energized would be essential to our shared success. Here is how we did it-

First Five Minutes

Any productive venture starts with an intention.Whether it is a driving goal or some simple mindfulness, a shared focus is key to conducive working conditions. The Fellows are given upwards of 480 minutes to work every Friday, we decided to spend the first five of every day standing in a circle, looking into the eyes of the 32 other people we had sharing this journey. Community, energy and fun were our goals. The laughs and smiles after each activity were our metrics.

Pechakucha

For anyone who has attended a Challenge Detroit presentation before, there is a general consensus that we never fail to provide insightful, if not inspiring, information and ideas, but the format in which we present it hasn’t always lived up to the same level of innovation; enter Pechakucha. Japanese for chit-chat, Pechakucha was adopted by a team of architects as a way to concisely convey their complex ideas in an engaging way. Twenty slides, twenty seconds per slide. Shifting the focus of our presentation from the verbal & written to the visual, the constantly changing graphics and intentional narration created a more engaging and digestible format. Our Fellows were up to the challenge of adapting their presentation style and absolutely nailed their transitions. Informal feedback again proved effective and the room of ‘thumbs up’ at the end of the morning marked our success.
Rapid Prototyping & Testing

Design thinking is tough. It goes against conventional thought processes and really forces the user to embrace discomfort. At first, it forces you to avoid solving the problem and, once a solution is developed, it sometimes asks you to be able to completely abandon or rethink that idea. On our final working Friday, we took our traditional peer review activity to the next level. Without any warning, we gave Fellows 15 minutes to prototype and physically represent their ideas, 15 minutes to present them to a group of peers and receive feedback, and the rest of the day to reiterate and improve upon their design. The products spoke for themselves.

Words

“If you had one shot, one opportunity, one moment…” Sorry, I had to make one Eminem reference! #Bad8MileJoke. But actually, what if you only had one word to summarize one of the most intensive years of your life? Well, for our last First Five activity, we asked just that.