Meetup #11: Designing Spaces for Thinking, Innovation and Business

(The session will be on the 5th floor. The Microsoft Office is within one block of the Friendship Heights Metro. Parking is available behind the Microsoft Office in the Wisconsin Place Garage, same garage as Whole Foods and Bloomingdale's. Park near the Office Tower elevator bank. These elevators will take you directly to the front desk of Microsoft. From in the main lobby, take elevator to the 5th floor.)

Our spaces affect the ideas and solutions we create. This session will explore spaces and design, ways thinking is influenced by spaces, and introduce tools for designing spaces that support innovation, collaboration and business.

This discussion will pull ideas from architecture, design, space planning, neuroscience, and psychology to highlight some of the ways thinking is affected by our workspaces, homes, offices, and cities. We’ll present a framework tying these ideas together. To explore these ideas, we’ll have a friendly design competition using a structured design challenge, design thinking tools, and a few expert eyes.

Meeting Agenda:
6:45pm - Networking and Introductions
7:00pm - Session Overview
7:05pm - Space Design Overview
7:35pm - Studio Design Challenge
8:50pm - Discussion and Future Topics

Ways DT:DC members can contribute to this session:

Workspace pictures: Please send a picture of your workspace to spacepics@fluidhive.com or tweet it with #dt4dc. We want real examples for the discussion. Even if you can’t make it, you can be part of the conversation about how we work and think. Boomerang Questions: If designing spaces or any of the other ideas sparks a question, tweet it with #dt4dc or to @DT_DC. We’ll try to work these into the discussion or push them back out to DT:DC minds. Experts: Architect? Space planner? Make your living designing spaces or teaching others to do so? We’d love for you to judge the design competition and act as subject matter experts the evening of the Meetup. Join in by letting one the organizers know that you’re on board.
About Dawan Stanford. Dawan is a design strategist using and teaching design thinking to help people and organizations succeed at Fluid Hive LLC (www.fludihive.com) and Folding Voice LLC (www.foldingvoice.com). This work focuses on leadership development, strategic solutions and service design. As a professor (www.liquidchimera.com), his research investigates how we create and understand meaning. Design tools and processes feature heavily in his thinking and writing. As a technology attorney, he quietly weaves elements of his other lives into solving and explaining legal and business matters.

About Stephanie Douglass. Stephanie is a Workplace Strategist with IA Interior Architects. Her background is a combination of design, psychology, communication and social science; her focus is people, and how space impacts them and the work they do. After completing a Masters in Environmental Design at Cornell investigating the impacts of health care environments, she has worked with a wide range of public and private clients helping to translate their organizational goals into workspaces that work for them.