How to Use Your Web Journal

Use the menu to the left to navigate to the page you wish to view. 

On each page, you can click on the graphic thumbnails to view a full size version. Use the browser "back" to return to the page.

If you click on a link to a Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint document, the file will open in the appropriate application (if you have it installed). You can download the document to your hard drive by right-clicking on the link and choosing the appropriate option from the menu which will then appear. 

This journal contains the textual and graphical documentation that was done "real time" during the course of our DesignSession® Event. The text in this journal is not a word for word transcript of everything that was said during your event. Instead it attempts to chronologically capture and synthesize the ideas, data and information expressed during the DesignSession.


Fiduciary Responsibility

Clearly, the participants have a fiduciary responsibility to each other and to their employers regarding the dissemination of the information in this document. This requires the highest possible standard of care that context and completeness are transferred as well as specific data and information. Any non-participant using this document should assume this same responsibility.

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About the Process

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Accelerated Solution Environments (ASEs), supported by knowledge workers of diverse skills, enable our consultants to leverage expertise in new ways in service to their clients. Innovative work processes are linked to technology, work environments and solution objects for rapid design, prototyping and implementation. Through synergy, group genius and time compression, value is generated for the whole enterprise.

A Design Event is one form of group work facilitated in an ASE. It is a process of "decision by design." The process differs from typical planning meeting or negotiation session. During a Design Event, participants are facilitated through a rigorous process of exploration, co-design, assessment and decision-making.

Design Events fuse planning and action, design and decision making, long and and short range goals. Design Events accomplish in a few days- and at a fraction of the cost - what usually takes weeks or months.

Design Events are built around three phases: Scan, Focus and Act.


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Scan, Focus, & Act

Scan is used to open up the range and depth of vision for the participants, in the scan phase, designers look into the future and outside of normal industry parameters. Hidden design assumptions are surfaced and examined; new ways of exploring and using information are discovered. During Scan participants are introduced to each other and to each others' ideas in ways far more interesting and meaningful than most working teams have experienced.

Focus brings focus to ideas explored during scanning. We use this phase to examine ideas, projects and assumptions from many different vantage points. We look for intersecting points between ideas and projects. Ideas that don't "fit" fall away naturally without voting or complex decision-making processes. Other ideas and projects "mature" through the process and become the path through which everything else will travel. The emphasis of this day is design. Ideas are selected because they grow stronger through this iterative process and they are not subject to compromise.

Act is action. Planning is the ordering of resources over time; success is getting things to follow each other in right order. During this phase we build excitement and commitment, and we define the work in terms of projects that have starting and ending points.

Within each phase the participants expand their creative abilities. Participants collaboratively define models of the future and develop specific goals and action plans.

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DesignShop® and certain associated terms are trademarks of the MG Taylor Corporation, the originator of the DesignShop concept. The DesignShop trademarks and related processes are used by permission of the MG Taylor Corporation under an exclusive license with Cap Gemini Ernst and Young LLC.