08/11/2016
The Launch Labs team had an awesome time last week at Cornell Tech helping facilitate a design thinking workshop with 50+ aspiring female technologists for the new WiTNY program. We empathized with users, did in-store immersions, brainstormed, built low-res prototypes and got feedback from testers. The young women on the design teams were inspiring, brilliant and really embraced the whole 'design thinking' mindset.
WiTNY is an awesome tech education program, aimed at increasing the number of women working in technology by creating immersive experiences for women in the undergraduate and graduate school pipeline.
There is a real need to increase the amount of women in technology and break the stigma of male dominated professions. Diversity breeds better solutions and progress for society. Not only diversity in gender, but in ethnicity, backgrounds, age and life experience.
It was amazing to teach these students design thinking along with the software development skills they were learning. We drove home the point that being in a technology profession isn't only about technology. Technology is a tool to solve real needs for real people. Software development can become your ability to 'author' solutions, but you still need a cross functional team to collaborate to figure out what to build.
We wish the teams good luck as they finalize their web prototypes this week and present to the program sponsors!
https://tech.cornell.edu/news/cornell-tech-cuny-and-founding-partner-verizon-announce-new-tech-education?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=witny&utm_campaign=witnyrelease
