Intuit Design Campfire
In a matter of days, designers across the globe were swept into the isolated reality of COVID 19. A long lonely year of working from home in an uncertain world lay ahead.
While a quick bandaid here and there temporarily eased the pain from the fear-stricken climate, I recognized the need to go bold and create an experience far beyond placating a day or two’s pandemic frustrations.
How might we energize, connect, and inspire the Design Community during an international lockdown? This was the question that sparked Design Campfire. Design Campfire is a virtual summer camp born to bridge the gap between a repressive global reality and a vision for a creatively connected community.
Like any summer camp, Design Campfire has a daily lineup of activities and challenges that build lifelong skills. More evident than ever before, the world needs designers to tackle the fierce challenges ahead. As a response, Design Campfire formed all skill-building activities on the framework proven to overcome ambiguous complex problems: Design Thinking. From sharing deep customer empathy insights to helping each other narrow to pain points, Design Campers banded together and pushed each other’s Design Thinking skills forward.
While the daily agendas are challenging, the Design Campfire brand experience takes on a happy, quirky, fun tone to help campers escape the nostalgic, campy, and connected feelings of summer camp. Gifs, witty copy, and bright colors are the heroes of the Design Campfire experience.
Making friends at camp is a given. Designers build relationships with other designers across the company as they are placed into trios, or “tents” to carry out their camp tasks. Camper’s take turns leading the tent activities for the day as each camper sharpens their facilitation and leadership skills.
Daily Design Campfire life begins with a good morning email that outlines the camp tasks for the day’s session. Each camp task is an inviting, “learn by doing” approach to learning, using, and building new Design Thinking skills.
Upon completing each camp task, Design Campers submit the results to a Slack channel for “Slackback” aka feedback. The Slackback channel, hosted by a team of expert Design Thinking coaches, helps the participants refine their Design Thinking skills, as each item of uploaded content receives personalized coaching.
S’mores and residual campfire smells are hard to come by over a virtual campfire, however, Design Campfire maintains the sloppy hang time through hosting various competitions. Designers can submit t-shirt designs, sketch-storm different new uses for a bandana, complete bonus methods, and push their team along to win the “Design Campfire Game Of Life”, a race to finish the daily tasks, all for prizes and recognition.
To the brave and loyal campers that made it to the finish line, Design Campfire ended in a prize collection of stickers, the printed winning t-shirt design, and a sleek Miir travel tumbler.
The 2020 results came in with raving reviews. Designers made new friends across the company, tightened up their Design Thinking skills, and ultimately up-leveled their day-to-day work and career development; Not a bad outcome for clocking in a few hours a week of going to camp, far far away from a pandemic.
