Future Tech Boss

with Black Girls Code

Project Type	Facilitation & Outreach
Length	Half-Day Workshop

Team	Experience Design Lead	Elise Ansher
	Experience Designer	Alazandra Shorter
	Experience Designer	Saba Aklilu
	Business Design Lead	Tiffany E. Smith
	Visual Designer	Dominick Terry
	Digital Producer	Jasmine Rogers
Length	Half-Day Workshop

FJORD partnered with Black Girls Code to introduce the DC Chapter’s intrepid coders to the world of design.

With a small team, I planned and facilitated Future Tech Boss, a half-day workshop of co-creation activities that spanned collecting and analyzing user research through prototyping and design critique.

Making tech accessible.

Black Girls Code’s vision is to empower girls of color “to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures.”

Having taught science in the past, I recognized that many students benefit from – and enjoy – experiential learning. Learning-by-doing not only teaches valuable skills that can complement in-class education, but also helps show kids that they are already very capable of doing “real work.”

We filled the agenda with the same co-creation activities we use with our federal clients. Through bonafide brainstorming, spitballing, sketching, and testing our future tech bosses began building problem-solving skills they can bring to their classrooms, their future careers, and beyond.

Design as a tool.

We built the agenda to reflect the product design cycle in order to give our participants, ages 9 to 14, as much hands-on learning as possible.

We kicked off the day with a career fair to introduce the girls to the different studio disciplines and varied backgrounds of the studio designers.

We filled the agenda with the same co-creation activities we use with our federal clients. Through bonafide brainstorming, spitballing, sketching, and testing our future tech bosses began building problem-solving skills they can bring to their classrooms, their future careers, and beyond.

We then explored design thinking as a problem-solving method applicable to all sorts of situations, rather than just an end-product deliverable.

Collecting user data with our participants

After dividing the girls into product teams, I tasked them with designing the next social media platform.

I created a survey about social media preferences and habits for each girl to complete at registration.

With the survey results collected, I discussed analyzing data to inform design decisions with the girls.

Let's cocreate!

After drawing insights from our survey, I worked with the girls to brainstorm what we like and don’t like about different social media platforms and affinity-map our ideas.