United Nations NYC Outreach
Empowering Every New Yorker to Become Ambassador to the UN
Role: Workshop Producer for ORGE Innovation/ Parsons
Innovation Consultant: Carlos Teixeira
Workshop Producers: Eileen Ellis, Sophie Hou
Knowledge Brokers: Reid Henkel, Danielle Christophe, Jinghang Huang, Lauren Wong, James Frankis, Mike Varona, Chisun Rees, Sean Baker
Clients:
The United Nations is the intergovernmental organization focused on fostering cooperation between nations through work based on three pillars: peacekeeping and security, human rights, and economic development and humanitarian assistance.
Parsons School of Design Strategies provides an experimental environment in which business and design education converge within the context of urban settings, services, and infrastructure.
http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/design-strategies-school-sds/
ORGE Innovation Consulting is a design-led innovation consultancy that provides organizations structured methods to help them stay innovative. ORGE Innovation offers services in the areas of Knowledge Brokering, Open Innovation Consortium, Design Strategies, Project Framing, Innovation Capacity Building, and Leadership Mentoring.
The UN Outreach Department collaborated with Parsons The New School of Design to ideate new ways the UN can outreach to its host city of New York. This 3-hour workshop was a pilot event for the formation of an innovation lab partnership between the United Nations in New York and Parsons. With members from the United Nations Department of Public Information, News and Media Department, and Strategic Communications Department, the workshop was designed and implemented to help participants identify NYC unique traits, create UN outreach programs using these features, and determine an implementation timeline. The workshop was filmed by an external film crew for experimental and educational purposes.
Open Innovation Consortium
By including participants from different sections and hierarchal positions within the UN Outreach Department, a diverse set of information and constructive critiques was freely added to the final ideas.
Project Framing
The workshop focus was derived from insights gained through interviews with UN members and native New Yorkers in order to identify and address the core and underlying issues, rather than center solutions around topical gaps.
Knowledge Brokering
Activities were designed to extract information gained from the participants' lifestyles both as New Yorkers and as United Nations employees, and applied specifically to the ideas of their making.
Design Strategies
Through the use of design strategies, communication silos within the organization were able to be broken and program ideas were generated without the impediment of conforming to established and slow-moving formal procedures.
Innovation Capacity Building
The workshop showed participants a new way to communicate efficiently and freely, use time productively, and think differently.
Leadership Mentoring
By working through this workshop process, members of each department were introduced to a new tool with which to create and develop new ideas in the future.
Workshop Structure
Rapid Ideation and Clustering
Participants quickly brainstormed NYC trends, patterns, and unique traits then identified and clustered key themes.
Domains of Collaboration
Several themes were chosen and comparatively analyzed for identical internal and external precedents on UN DPI vs. NYC and UN vs. Global scales.
Precedent Breakdown
Features were extracted from precedent projects and analyzed for their characteristics, gaps, and possible opportunities for outreach and development.
Concept Ideation
Features and user profiles taken from Humans of New York served as inspirations for the development and combination of two rounds of final concept ideation. This included exploration of stakeholders, available and needed assets, channels, and a visualization of the overall system.
Implementation Timeline
Starting with the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, participants mapped key steps of the 9-month implementation timeline.
Workshop Film
A series of experimental films detailing the various unique activities and idea flows during this innovation workshop is currently in production.
Role-Specific Tasks
Workshop Production
Production schedules were used to delegate tasks and ensure that work was completed on time. The workshop plan was distributed to Knowledge Brokers and training for the workshop was provided. Additional outreach materials for UN participants was created by myself.
Workshop Design
Working with the other Workshop Producer: Sophie Hou, four Knowledge Brokers: Reid Henkel, Danielle Christophe, Lauren Wong, Jinghang Huang, and myself, we designed each activity, the workflow, frameworks, and additional materials.
Workshop Materials Creation
The final materials were designed by Workshop Producer: Sophie Hou, four Knowledge Brokers: Reid Henkel, Danielle Christophe, Lauren Wong, Jinghang Huang, and myself using Adobe Illustrator.
Knowledge Brokering and Workshop Management
During the workshop, knowledge brokering tasks were performed to draw out participants' tacit knowledge and encourage idea sharing and mixing. In order to follow the schedule and ensure continuation of movement between activities, time was managed throughout and participants within groups were switched as needed according to latent roles and personality traits.
(Note: I am not the one in the picture; I am holding the camera.)