Design Thinking Toolbox by Pedro Segreto
Pedro Segreto is an Italo-Brazilian independent designer and facilitator who helps companies solve complex problems through design sprints and co-creation agile processes. Excitingly, Pedro’s toolbox (in Portuguese) is one of the first toolboxes in another language to be submitted to Toolbox Toolbox.
What’s your toolbox all about? Why does it exist? What problems is it aiming to help solve?
My box is full of tools to help teams co-create business and branding solutions from a design thinking perspective. I started to design my tools for use in multiple purpose design sprints, aiming to mix different frameworks and methodologies in a simple and practical way. As a facilitator, I also felt that I needed a consistent visual identity across all my touch-points with my clients to give them the confidence and comfort of hiring an independent professional.
The tools are organised into 7 categories
- Branding
- Business Model
- Personal Branding
- Planning
- Service Design
- Understanding
- Meta tools. (Meta tools are those to design new tools and design processes.)
Who developed it? What was the team that you put together?
I developed my first tool with my partners at my old studio: Caos! Design. We had a lot of audiovisual projects and we wanted to apply design thinking and co-creation methods to this field. So, we started to research and understand a lot of different famous tools and canvases, at the same time as organising the information needed to apply a film project for all kinds of festivals, support and development programs.
From all of this, we arrived at Video:Canvas, a visual tool to use in our client projects. After that, I left the studio and set myself up independently, which led me to develop more than 60 tools of my own so far — 30 of them published on my website, with Creative Common licenses, and the first digital one in the Miroverse.
How do you practically use the toolbox in your work? And how do others use it?
I plan and facilitate design sprints and workshops for a broad range of problems and scenarios, usually from large Brazilian companies. For each one of them, I design a tailor-made process combining the tools and other activities to guide teams towards tangible solutions. Since most of my tools are available for download from my website, a lot of people use them for different purposes and objectives. Every time I receive feedback or find the tools in social networks posts, it is a huge pleasure and I try to learn as much as possible from comments and others’ practices.
What do you think is next for the toolbox? Do you have plans to update or change it?
Whenever I face a recurring problem, I start to study and research the most varied sources I can find. So, I am always designing and testing new tools, activities, and dynamics that help me to turn complexity into schematic approaches and visualisations.
Since the pandemic, I have moved my work to a completely digital environment, using Miro as my main platform to facilitate the sprints and workshops. Now, I am creating and adapting each tool and board for the client’s problem purpose.
I’ve already started to move my tools to Miroverse and I would like to publish the best of them regularly. I am also writing a book to share my experience in planning and facilitating design sprints. So, the next step is not just to offer my tools but also to share a framework to help other facilitators to connect the tools in meaningful and practical processes.
What’s your opinion on the idea of toolboxes in general? At this point everyone seems to have their own! When are they useful and when not?
I love toolboxes! I think everyone has something to learn from them. They don’t have to be exclusionary. You can find what is useful for you and your organisation and build your own, developing and designing new tools or just collecting from different sources. A tool alone could be used in multiple types of activities, but a toolbox usually has a proper intention, a focal problem.
So, as much as the community shares new tools and toolboxes, we all can keep on learning from each other and spread collaboration as an important approach to solve the complex problems of the digital and modern life that we all face.
Thanks to Pedro Segreto for the interview. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Instagram. Check out ToolboxToolbox.com for more where this came from 🛠
