DesignFest 2019-20:

Stories at the Center:
Design & The Human Experience

DesignFest is a multi-part school-wide learning event, harnessing a design-thinking framework to create innovative solutions to challenges all around us.

The DesignFest 2020 theme championed the principle that good design starts with understanding the needs of real people and our planet before launching into solutions. Everyone is a designer and we can strive to be very good ones by rooting our work in empathy and taking time to listen to people's stories and learn their perspectives.

Teachers at all grade levels created developmentally appropriate design challenges to engage their students in the exciting process of identifying real problems, brainstorming solutions and bringing those ideas into the world as prototypes that are tested and improved.

Grade-Level Design Challenges

  • K - REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE: Resources preservation on camps

  • 1 - RECREATION: Finding solutions to common playground problems

  • 2 - SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: Creating businesses the give back (with a culminating Shark Tank)

  • 3 - STEWARDSHIP: Humans and animal endangerment

  • 4 - BOOK TO SCREEN: Empathy and the power of Point of View (making silent film book trailers to share with Horizons students)

  • 5 - RIGHTS OF PASSAGE: Making the Middle School transition

  • 6 - IMPROVING SYSTEMS: Redesigning Trinity's dining hall and recycling experiences

  • 7 - DIGGING INTO THE FUTURE: Story discovery and preservation through an archeological dig + Script to Screen: 7th grade English students go to Hollywood

  • 8 - DESIGN THINKING WALKTHROUGH: Student-run activity stations


FRIDAY, MARCH 13TH, 2020 - CANCELLED DUE TO COVID

8:00 A.M. ALL-SCHOOL ASSEMBLY
Special guests from Community First! Village
Sarah Satterlee, Architect
Taylor Graham, Director of Stewardship

8:45 A.M. PARENT Q&A
With Community First! guests in the Dining Hall

9:00 A.M. DESIGN THINKING KICKOFF
Activity begins in classrooms across campus.
"Materials Marketplace" and "Fabrication Station" open in BHH and Legacy Hall Libraries and D-Lab Jr.

10:40 A.M. DESIGN THINKING STATIONS OPEN FOR VISITORS

  • Empathy
    Mirror drawing
    Other-handedness
    Aphasia simulations

  • Brainstorm
    Fast v slow (slow down a speedboat and speed up a canoe)
    What can you do with that?
    Circles everywhere!

  • Prototyping
    Imagination Playground
    Foil and Float
    5 Chairs

  • 3D Post-it World with Meg Renwick