Challenging! Wonderful! Exciting!

Published 16.11.2016
We could not ask for more! The feedback was overwhelming after a full day's intense workshop with Justin Ferrell, Fellowship director at Stanford d.school. Ferrell was back in Bergen to visit NCE Media, and to give a Design Sprint workshop for a few selected teams from the media cluster, and a keynote speech for more than 110 attendees from the media and tech industry in Bergen.

Justin Ferrell has a close connection to the media cluster, and has on several occasions worked with various companies within the cluster and with NCE Media. He is a former journalist for The Washington Post, most recently as the Director of Digital, Mobile & New Product Design. He brought the first mobile designers and programmers into the newsroom, and enabled collaborative teams of reporters, editors and developers to create groundbreaking work. He designed the investigative series “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, as well as four other Pulitzer finalists. Now leads the d.school’s three-year media experiments project, a portfolio of experiential prototypes at the intersection of digital media and community action. The program helps entrepreneurial professionals learn and apply Design Thinking to organization design, to create and spread behavior-driven systemic change.

Anita Reinton Utgård and Anne Christine Bratt from NRK.

For a few selected teams from the media cluster, NCE Media hosted a full day workshop with Justin Ferrell as coach and teacher. In a combination of practical and theoretical exercises, the attendees worked hard and intense, having brought their own challenges to use as cases during the full day workshop.

Anita Reinton Utgård and Anne Christine Bratt from NRK in Oslo were amongst the first to sign up for the workshop – exactly two minutes after NCE Media had launched the event on our website.

– We could not miss this, Utgård said.
– This was really, really useful, and gave us insight and new knowledge we easily can bring back our other colleagues in Oslo. The next time we are designing and developing new concepts, I’m going to make sure I ask all the essential control questions along the way. This is all about understanding who we create for. Just brilliant.

Extreme prototyping from the Vizrt-team.

Justin himself found it interesting to learn about the different projects the teams were working on, and also to see how the teams moved from what they started with in the morning to where they ended up at wrap up time at the end of the day.

– Some of these projects are really complex and ambitious, and I hope the tools they learn today can be useful, he said.
– Typically, different people have different outcome, and these are activities that can be used individually. Some gain more insight in their project – others learn how to better structure their teamwork.

Anne Christine Bratt was also very pleased with the day and the outcome.

– Yes. I found it both challenging and interesting, and there was a lot of things here that I never really have thought about before, although it seems so obvious now, she laughed.
– These are the exercises I will use when I initiate my next project.

The teams attending the workshop were from: Vizrt, Sixty, Alf Gundersen, Motitech, NRK and Vimond.

Justin teaching Design Thinking.

Anita Reinton Utgård and Anne Christine Bratt from NRK presenting their project.

One big happy family.

Justin coaching the Vizrt team.

The sixty team working on their challenge.

Vizrt team presenting and prototyping.

NRK team.

Vizrt - work in progress.