E Design Week: The Design-Thinking Workshop for Everyone

Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels trying to find new ideas for products and services? Feel like your learning curve has plateaued? Want to hear more directly from customers but don’t have a way to? Bored with your daily work routines? Spice up your life by attending E Design Week, December 10 to 12 at the E Source headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

E Design Week is our design-thinking workshop focused on creating innovative, customer-facing products and services.

No, this is not a self-help advertisement or a late-night infomercial. E Design Week is far more useful (and only two and a half days, despite the name). This is our design-thinking workshop focused on creating innovative, customer-facing products and services. “What is design thinking?” you may ask. Design thinking is an approach to new product development that puts human needs at the core of the entire process. Why does this matter? Because we can come up with all sorts of great ideas, but if they’re not solving customers’ problems, then nobody’s going to care. Design thinking ensures we’re relentlessly focused on creating new ideas that deliver real value to real people, throughout the process.

E Design Week does this by analyzing new ethnographic market research in four areas: low income, electric vehicles, connected homes/virtual assistants, and small and midsize business (SMB) customer engagement and experience. This research is different from anything else in the industry, featuring videos, photos, and audio clips of actual customers answering open-ended study questions designed to get you thinking about why customers are taking certain actions, why certain perceptions exist, and how customers have formed their behaviors and beliefs.

Attendees will actively brainstorm solutions to real customers’ problems.
E Design attendees make notes while watching ethnographic research video clips

E Design Week is true customer-centric innovation. We spend a healthy amount of time breaking down the challenges people bring up, then create exciting new concepts to address those challenges. Participants will walk away with a suite of new concepts to take back to their utility.

Activities include rapid prototyping of innovative product and service offerings.
E Design attendee’s sketch of an new electric vehicle charging station design

Don’t expect your typical passive conference. This is an active, hands-on workshop. Our blend of unique exercises and research will shake up your routine and get you thinking about perplexing problems from new angles. You’ll learn how to apply the customer-centric principles and practices of design thinking to the work you do back at the office and get to show off your newfound knowledge to your colleagues.

If you work on electric vehicles, connected homes, low income, or SMBs and are looking for ways to create innovative new ideas, get a fresh perspective on customers, or reinvigorate your learning, then E Design Week is for you. Plus, over the two and a half days you’ll have fun and meet a whole bunch of new people who are working on similar issues. Three seats are included for members of the E Source E Design 2020 initiative, but the event is open to any utility professional looking to develop their skills. See the full agenda and registration info. We hope to see you there!

Register now!

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Adam Maxwell Innovation and design thinking topics Design thinking Ethnographic research Market transformation Modeling Processes Product development Program design Rates Strategy Training