Community with SF Design Week
Opportunity in your local community.
On June 27th, Yelp hosted a San Francisco Design Week event at our 140 New Montgomery headquarters. SFDW is a week-long festival that showcases the unique intersection of ideas, design, business & entrepreneurism that makes the Bay Area the birthplace of the future. This year’s theme was community and being that Yelp’s mission is to connect communities with great local businesses, we were pumped. We thought there was no better way than to showcase some local businesses and the awesome people that own them.
Here are the businesses that attended:
- Social Imprints, a screen printing company that opened their doors in 2008 with a commitment to provide higher-paying professional jobs to at-risk adults in need of a second chance.
- Embla, a home good store that donates 10% of their sales to Planet Bee Foundation — a non-profit in the Marin County focused on bee preservation.
- Teranga, which means hospitality in Wolof the Senegalese national language, is a beverage company that uses the baobab superfood as the base for most of its drinks, shots, and popsicles.
- Michael’s Chocolates, which was started by chocolatier Michael Benner and his husband Curtis Wallis in San Francisco in 2017.
- Burly Beverages, the Sacramento based beverage company with a focus in sustainability.
And last but not least, shout out to our amazing caterers for keeping our bellies fully throughout the night.
- Aeden Fermented Foods, hand crafted, small batch Japanese foods.
- Kiss My Seoul, authentic Korean cuisine that uses fresh, high quality ingredients.
Creating community.
After browsing the booths, meeting the business owners, and trying the tasty foods, attendees participated in a Design Thinking Activity. We had everyone sit with a new group of people and introduce themselves to each other. After the business owners were introduced to the Design Week attendees, I talked about the activity. We were going to be running something know as a Reciprocity Ring* with the attendees and business owners.
This activity is a dynamic group exercise that applies the “pay-it-forward” principle to the group while creating and cementing high-quality connections. This would hopefully help attendees and business owners to solve real problems in both their personal and professional lives. The goal was to build empathy and a sense of community within this group of people.
Here was the prompt I had the attendees and business owners work with…
After introducing the prompt, I had participants each write out their problem statements. I provided the format “As a _______, I need ________ so that ________.” Everyone wrote their individual problems out and posted them on a large sheet in the room.
After problem statements were posted, everyone walked around the room to read the problems. Participants provided their advice, tools for solving the problem, and even contact info for follow-up. It was great to see each of the boards fill up with amazing ideas and advice for each of these problems.
Overall, this was a new activity and exploration for Yelp. I was pleasantly surprised at how vulnerable everyone was with sharing their problems and providing solutions. I could see how business owners and attendees opened up throughout the process. I think this exercise has a great benefit for both businesses and individuals. I’m collecting feedback and hope to run other great events like this in the future!
You’ve made it to the end, thanks for reading!
Here’s a great podcast talking about the benefits of Reciprocity exercises.
Feeling inspired to get to know us a little better? Look us up on Dribbble, and if you’ve got the design chops and are passionate about local businesses, check out current openings for the Yelp Product Design team at yelp.com/careers.
