Using Design Thinking to Solve Community Problems

By: Veronica Aku Dogbegah

The Community Project Leaders Program is an initiative lead by the department of Innovation and Business Engagement that focuses on bringing the community and St. Lawrence College students together. The objective of the program is to assist students in developing their employability skills and leverage their experience for future employment opportunities. This year, the program has adopted the Kingston Mayor’s Innovation Challenge, focusing in on two streams: The Dunin-Deshpande Smart Kingston Stream and the Public Sector Innovation Stream.   

In collaboration with Career Services, The Innovation Hub organized a design thinking workshop to open the minds of participants by asking them to solve challenges provided by the Mayor of Kingston’s program. This workshop was led by one of our student and design thinking experts, Veronica Dogbegah. It was an interactive workshop with lots of activities that encouraged participants to spend as much time with the problem as they would on the solution.   

The second objective of this workshop was to help those involved understand that design thinking is not just a process, at some point we will have to think outside the box to address immediate challenges. The difference now is that we are conscious of our abilities to use design thinking and creative with tools to be innovative. Some of the tools learnt include empathizing with the user, creating personas, stakeholder mapping, brainstorming, brain dumping, wall of data and lean business model canvas during the ideation phase.  

We believe that the skills learned at the workshop will help participants apply creativity to their municipal challenge solution to advance Kingston as a smart, livable, leading city for citizens and students to thrive in.