Educational Miscellany
- Research
- Strategy
- Training
- Presentations
From training peers and client teams & leading a Sketch workshop at DC Design Week, I’m always interested in finding opportunities to become a better instructor.
Education has always been exciting to me. It unlocks the potential of creative and innovative minds of all ages, and it’s surely the most effective way to generate positive, exponential change in the world. I find a lot of joy in taking opportunities to share knowledge with others—whether for a client or within an organization—and I would love to continue to build the skill.
Creating a Slack Daily Trainer
While working the Pew Charitable Trusts, my team and piloted a month-long daily training tool. The purpose of the tool was to help refresh Pew’s internal communications team by offering quick, daily exercises related to communications topics—like creating personas, drafting quick wireframes, and identifying voice and tone. These exercises would keep creative techniques front of mind for the participants to use more often day-to-day.
My team and I worked to develop a series of Slack courses that lasted 2-4 weeks each. Each course included daily exercises focused around one communications topic. Participants would complete the exercises and discuss the activities in Slack—the tasks were available where the employees already were and could each be completed in 5-10 minutes.
The tasks ranged from simple questions that could be answered quickly, to interactive prompts that required using online tools or drawing with paper.
On another day, participants submitted quick storyboards:
Because the project was a pilot, we took feedback regularly and made adjustments as the month went on.
Client
Project Team
This project was created during my time at Threespot.
Research, strategy, defining tasks, and running pilot—Meryl Pritchett
Research, strategy, and direction—Elizabeth Barth, Sid Barcelona, Jamie Perez
Project management—Lizzy Cederberg
Sketch Workshop at DC Design Week 2017
In 2017 I planned and ran a beginner’s level Sketch workshop. I gave an overview of the tool, and taught the attendees the basics from creating simple text and shapes through creating symbols and exporting assets. By the end of the class, participants had each built a full page design in the program.
Internal Presentations & Trainings
While I was at Threespot, the company would regularly host lunch meetings called “Sharespots”, where someone would share an hour-long presentation or workshop on a topic they wanted to share. I enjoyed taking the opportunity to share knowledge when I could—like to distill learnings I aquired at an NNG workshop:
…or to train project managers and creative directors on communicating data accurately and effectively in presentations:
