TEACHING 
INNOVATION

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INTRO

I was honored to work for The New School alongside John Bruce and Steven Hamilton. Together we designed a customized curriculum for a select group of company strategists and innovators at Campbell’s. During our 3-Day Intensive for Innovation – an experiential bootcamp exploring design approaches to complexity for creative intervention – design research theories, methods, and tools were examined and practiced.


My role during the project included preparation and adjustment of the design research tools used during the workshop, developing the general workshop guidelines and flow, workshop facilitation, photography and design of the final deliverable.

The journey of our workshop activities was guided by a flow of emergent content themes, moving from one exercise to another, and building capacities for insights and clarity for articulating ideas.

Our 3-Day Intensive for Innovation concluded with a couple of powerful backcasting exercises: the visioning  exercise reflected in the report, and also an exercise called Love Letters – a private speculation addressing ways forward within the company. Love Letters is a tool that relies on our common language in shared spacesof trust, familiarity and personal perspectives on possibilities for change. Referencing the work of Joseph John Campbell, a scholar of comparitive mythology and famous for the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the exercise asks us to write an email in plain languageto a person we love and trust. In this email (letter), the task is to describe what is broken in our world (the ecosystem of our work, in this case), and express a vision of how we might support the hero’s journey –new energy and focus to bring about substantive shifts regarding a current paradigm. These letters were asked to be sent to the author, days later, as another reflective artifact of fresh perspective, as gleaned through new capacities from the workshop.