DesignImmigration | Full-Day Design Sprint

Join us for a one-of-a-kind immigration-themed design sprint workshop.

By bringing together forward-thinking designers, hackers, and legal & policy experts, and by learning and applying best practices in design thinking, we hope to inspire creative new solutions to age-old issues in immigration.

The three primary goals of this event are:

1. Impactful Ideas. Focus less on technology, and more on creative ideas tested with real immigrants from different backgrounds
2. Cross-Pollination. Bring together legal/policy experts, design thinkers, and technologists who wouldn’t otherwise meet
3. Community. Build community, continue what we started at Startup Weekend Immigration

Can I still participate if I’m not a designer? If so, how can I contribute?

Yes, definitely! As long as you are passionate about immigration issues, you are welcome to participate.

What is “design thinking”?

Generally speaking, design thinking is all about asking yourself, “What is the real, fundamental, root problem?” For example, if someone asks you to build them a bridge, rather than asking “what kind?”, a design thinker would ask “What is the core problem?” and “What is the best way to solve this problem [more easily and efficiently transport things across water]?”

As renowned cognitive scientist Don Norman once said...

“Design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers — all great innovators have practiced this, even if unknowingly, regardless of whether they were artists or poets, writers or scientists, engineers or businesspeople.” 

What is a “design sprint workshop”?

Google Ventures defines a design sprint as “An iterative process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” Alternatively, Google Developers describes it as “A structured brainstorm based on design thinking and agile development.”

Design sprints enable you to:

• Clarify the problem (i.e. immigration difficulties) at hand, and identify the needs of potential users

• Explore solutions through brainstorming and sketching exercises

• Distill your ideas into one or two solutions that you can test

• Prototype your solution and bring it to life

• Test the prototype with people who would use it

(via O’Reilly Media)

How is this different from a hackathon?

Hackathons are primarily focused on applying new technologies in new ways. They are a way of creatively exploring what is possible. On the other hand, a design sprint seeks to dive deep inside a problem space and derive unexpected and non-obvious new solutions via in-person user research, in-person user testing, and

In that sense, most/all hackathons start off with a “design sprint” component at the beginning, when teams are brainstorming and discussing what exactly they will be building. A design sprint event basically takes that part of hackathons and expands it into a standalone event.

Last but not least, this design sprint event will actually be a precursor to a future immigration-themed hackathon, similar to the Startup Weekend Immigration that took place in May 2015.

Startup Weekend Immigration 2015