Telstra Foundation challenges not-for-profits to think bigger, bolder and differently about the way they confront wide-scale social change.
Workshops were specifically designed to help organisations reimagine the way they deliver products, services and programs enabled by technology. The Telstra Imaginarium 6-day bootcamps were held across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
We immersed attendees in human-centred design methodologies and principles, from building empathy with system users through to rapid prototyping. This enabled participants to actively understand how to transform data and ethnography into actionable insights, and how to use them to fire up pilot initiatives or to improve their existing services.
Participants were encouraged to get out of their comfort zones and expand their thinking. They learned human centred design principles, and explored how a design thinking approach might play out in their contexts.
There are people in my team who didn’t attend the Imaginarium who are instantly seeing the value in it. We as a team can own these ideas and bring a huge amount of value to our users.
Dan Broadbent, Online Community Coordina
Imaginarium participants worked through design tasks together, with hands-on activities helping to build their understanding.
The Telstra Imaginarium enabled 120 leaders from the not-for-profit sector to cross-pollinate and share their respected challenges. Attendees were given hands on activities to work together and apply human-centred methodologies on each other’s real life organisational challenges. The bootcamps aim to develop a culture of design thinking and innovation throughout the not-for-profit sector.
It can take years to gather traditional and formal research findings to influence changes to policy; the environment that we operate in changes really quickly. A lot of the tools in the ‘Imaginarium’ have breathed more life into our traditional research methods.
Carolyn Finnis, Community Relations Manager
Outcome
Since the Imaginarium, participants have actively and successfully built the design thinking tools into their day-to-day challenges, approaching problems through the lens of their users.
The Imaginarium’s overwhelming success has encouraged the Telstra Foundation and Today to investigate ways of growing and sustaining the boot camp.