Resilience by Design

Portland Design Thinkers are excited to welcome Vikki Espinosa: Resilience by Design

What happens when your life or career gets knocked sideways?

In this interactive session, Vikki Espinosa shares her 3 Rs Framework—Resilience, Recovery, and Redesign—a personal and professional process for navigating disruption. Through real stories and design thinking tools, she explores how to recover from setbacks, redesign your path, and move forward with intention. Whether you're facing illness, injury, or unexpected change, this session invites you to reframe the chaos as a creative challenge.

You'll reflect on your current state, explore micro-recovery practices, identify what's no longer working, and design a tiny next step that aligns with your values. Vikki offers a trauma-aware, adult-learning-informed approach that supports all types of learners, with options to write, draw, map, or share their thoughts.

Attendees will leave with:

• A simple worksheet and personal reflection map
• Microrecovery tactics and reframing prompts
• A one-sentence reminder to carry forward
• A practical redesign plan that starts now

This session combines storytelling, psychology, and design thinking to help you navigate life's most challenging moments with flexibility, creativity, and resilience.

About our Speaker:
Vikki Espinosa is a writer, educator, and career strategist known for her practical, design-inspired approach to resilience and reinvention. Throughout her career, she's rebuilt more than once—navigating loss, identity shifts, and life-altering detours that demanded creativity, clarity, and grit.

Drawing from both personal experience and decades of coaching, Vikki helps individuals and teams approach disruption as a design challenge—something to iterate on, not just survive. Her work focuses on taking small, smart steps forward, especially in moments of uncertainty.
She lives in Oregon with her husband and their rescue dog, and believes in the power each of us has to make the changes needed to lead a fulfilling and purpose-driven life.

***
If you have any questions or would like to connect with other members of PDT, join our Slack community.

PDT is a volunteer-run Oregon nonprofit organization, and as you can imagine, organizing events can be expensive. We rely on sponsors and donations to help us offset these costs. If you would like to help, we accept donations through Venmo @PortlandDesignThinkers.