Our final day of the Design Thinking seminar at Georgia College & State University officially started at 9 a.m. In practice, it started somewhere between 9 a.m. and “give me thirty minutes.” We had been out with the American students the evening before, so of course coffee came first. But we did not have a lot of time to spare, at 2 p.m. we would be presenting our concepts to Southwire and Celonis.
Luckily, we had been smart the day before. We put in a long session on the presentation, so the PowerPoint was more or less finished when we started that day. That left us with only some polishing and practice to do. We split the work. One part of the team took over the last changes in PowerPoint, while those of us who were presenting focused on rehearsing. I first ran through our part with my ideation group, Leon, Lorelei, and Grant. Grant, Lorelei, and I were the ones speaking, so we went through our section until everyone was confident with their part. After that, the whole group did two final run-throughs together.
The Presentation
The presentation itself went smoothly, and afterwards there was a lot to think about.
What stuck with me wasn’t just getting through it without anything going wrong. It was seeing how the ideas were picked up in the room. At the beginning of the week, most of us had approached the whole thing like a consulting project. Find the problem, build the solution, hand it over. Armin pointed out fairly early that this isn’t what design thinking is for. The goal isn’t to deliver a finished business case, it’s to generate impulses that a company can take further on its own. That distinction really clicked for me during the feedback session. Nobody was expecting a ready-made answer from us, and the ideas that got the most attention were the ones that opened up a new way of looking at a problem. That is where the value of the method actually sits.
A good example was our “Data Health Tamagotchi.” On paper it’s a fairly far-fetched concept. A virtual pet whose wellbeing depends on the state of your data quality. Feed it good data, it thrives. Neglect it, and, well. I honestly wasn’t sure how something like that would land in front of two companies. It ended up sparking real interest, and hearing people engage seriously with an idea that unconventional was probably my favourite moment of the whole week.
Lake House, Tubing, and a Husband on a Mission
After the presentation, the entire group drove out to the lake house of Dr. Joy Godin, the American professor. None of us really knew what to expect. What we got was exactly the American lake house you have in your head: water, dock, sun, the whole thing.
We swam, we kayaked, and, my personal highlight, we went tubing. Four of us hanging on to two tubes behind the boat, clinging on to the straps while Joy’s husband did everything in his power to launch us into the lake. It was incredibly fun. At one point Onur and Jaward were flying through the air above Simon and me, but somehow we all managed to hold on.
After a long day and all of that, we were pretty exhausted, which is the ideal state in which to be handed a homemade BBQ. Joy and her husband cooked for all of us, and it was the perfect end to the afternoon.
The Last Evening
Back in Milledgeville, we all ended up at Zach’s place to let the week wind down. We talked about the presentation, the projects, and everything that had happened since Monday. We also got a tour of a frat house, which was exactly like the movies, and considerably dirtier than you would expect.
And then it was over. The goodbye was harder than I expected. One week is a short amount of time, but with everything we did over those days, the group became close quickly. Saying goodbye already felt strange, which is probably the best sign that the week, and the seminar, worked.
