Chadwick Wingrave Presents Creativity to Product Crash Course

Throughout the process of the Unisys/Walnut St. Labs’ Prototyping Competition (#ProtoComp2015), the Walnut St. Labs team regularly congregates to plan the coordination of its upcoming installments. Each week, we find ourselves continually saying, “Surely this week we’ll have a smaller turnout and things will finally start to dial down”, and each Wednesday we are confronted with just how high the level of extinction rate truly is for this event. People are so excited to come back each week, learn new things and show us made they’re made of. It’s been super exciting!

We’re ending out Week Two of with almost every representative of each team present for tonight’s bootcamp and advisement sessions. Despite the fact that we’ve tailored a variety of content to aid in the process of building a User Interface, much of the wireframes’ architecture is left to be imagined by the group. It’s inspiring to see each team form uniquely interesting approaches and finding different means to execute their directives.

At such a pivotal stage in the competition, teams are responsible for transitioning between throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks to turning their best ideas into a tangible and organized deliverables. Brainstorming is one thing, but really sculpting one’s ideas into an effective end product is an entirely different animal.

Breaking out of our existing thinking, to create an innovative and effective product, is as much inspiration as it is process. Chad Wingrave hit on what it means to be creative and what is takes to turn those creative juices into a product, or productize it. He discussed the methods to rapidly explore design ideas, and end with approaches for quick and dirty evaluations that shape further design.

#ProtoComp2015 is breaking new ground. We’re creating a platform for interested parties to learn new skills and be given the chance to build something new, in a collaborative and supportive environment. We want to see our community grow and adapt with us and we’re incredibly grateful to see how incredibly enriching the entire experience has been for all involved parties.

Traditional methodologies have suggested that organizations lacking in immediate or specialized internal skills to necessary to execute new projects should focus on more cost effective solutions, like outsourcing. Within recent years, the wide spread organizational pivot to outsourcing has all but taken over. Countless creative projects have since been redirected towards crowdsourcing solutions and the momentum by our account seem to be picking up.

Crowdsourcing changed the game and provided a new way to keep creative efforts cheap and local. Instead giving away all our creative potential to other countries, lets put our heads together and create something awesome! Jim Thompson illustrates, “I truly believe this is what the future of R&D looks like. Forget outsourcing, nothing quite like collaborative organic development to challenge the status quo and get out of the box. Think of it as Crowdsourcing 2.0!”