Skillful Engagement: Design Thinking for Facilitation

Skillful Engagement is a community of practice for engagement practitioners. The series showcases innovative projects and speakers, provides a forum to share knowledge and challenges, and acts as a catalyst to inspire and support the growing engagement sector. This work reflects a shared understanding that improved engagement of communities, organizations and stakeholders leads to better decisions and stronger, more resilient outcomes.

Skillful Engagement is a partnership between the SFU Centre for Dialogue’s Civic Engage Program, SFU Public Square, and SFU’s Dialogue and Civic Engagement Certificate program.

During the third installment of the Skillful Engagement series – Design Thinking for Facilitators – you’ll learn about design thinking, a human-centred, systems-based approach to problem solving that encourages you to step back and explore a problem space with an open mind and an expanding set of methods. Design thinking is an iterative, generative and collaborative process that aims to deeply understand and reframe  complex problems into tangible opportunities for social and sustainable innovation. Similar to engagement practices, design thinking is transdisciplinary and optimistic.

This introductory workshop invites you to participate in a hands-on design jam, in which design thinking theory and methods are put into practice, to generate, capture and share unexpected solutions to your community engagement challenges. Through this experience, you will have a better understanding of the Design Jam process and framework, how it can flex and adapt to different contexts, and see why it is a successful tool for civic engagement and collaboration.

Come with an open mind, expect to have some fun, and walk away with new tools and approaches for bringing people together to better understand and address complex issues and engage in collaborative problem solving.

photos from the event: