A Workshop Series in collaboration with Design Thinking RVA

Join us for a design thinking workshop at the Institute for Contemporary Art,

on Saturday, November 22nd, 2025, from 11AM-12:30PM.

☕

Enjoy a cup of coffee with us at the ICA Cafe.

Stick around to see the galleries afterwards.

RSVP for November 22nd

Building Cities with Character

A 90-minute design thinking lab using three modes of practice... Field Discovery, Deep Sensemaking, and Collaborative Creation... to listen to the East Riverfront, make sense of its complexity, and prototype civic tools in real time.

️

Field Discovery

Voices, signals, and stories from the East Riverfront

Project real voices, quotes, and artifacts from the district into the room.
Treat lived experience as design data rather than anecdote or opinion.
Practice human-sensor awareness by tuning into small details and emotional cues.

🧩

Deep Sensemaking

Stakeholder constellations, root-cause trees, and pattern clustering

Map people, institutions, flows of resources, and influence across the East Riverfront system.
Use a root-cause tree to trace underlying drivers, visible symptoms, and knock-on effects.
Cluster signals into themes in a fast mini affinity session to focus attention.

⚙️

Collaborative Creation

Live AI prototyping with VoiceBuild and civic concept sketches

Translate insights directly into live prototypes and concept frames inside Character Developer.
Watch early versions of a “district scorecard” and other tools emerge in real time.
Small groups design a third prototype the AI team builds or refines on the spot.

Session Focus

The Building in Question

Intermediate Terminal Building, Circa 1939

3101 Wharf Street

📷 Photography by T. Alford Jr.

Introducing your Co-Design Thinkers

Alexander Whiteway, M.S. | Facilitator

Philosopher-Builder & AI Vertilateral Strategist. Founder, Managing Partner, Principal @ Modern Ancients | Tech Advisor, Strategic Ecosystem Design Architect and Capital Connector for Transformational Placemaking
Contact
Ruth Lemma | Co-Host of Design Thinking RVA

Digital Marketing & Growth Strategist | Campaign Optimization | Content & Social Media Strategy | Driving ROI & Engagement for Brands & Communities
Contact
Thurmond "T." Alford Jr., (MFA-DT) (C-MP/T) | Co-Host of Design Thinking RVA

Design Thinking Meets Mindfulness: Building Human-Centered Solutions that Inspire Calm, Focus & Creative Brilliance
Contact

About Design Thinking RVA

Design Thinking RVA is a community of practitioners who meet each month to explore, practice, and talk shop about human-centered design. We’re not a formal training program or a branded methodology shop. We’re simply a group of designers who enjoy comparing approaches, trying out activities, and growing our craft together.

Each month, we focus on a different framework. In October, we explored several LUMA-inspired methods… In January, we will be shifting back to the Stanford d.school approach, then on to the UK’s Double Diamond, and eventually other lenses and variants. The rotation keeps things fresh and reminds everyone that design thinking isn’t a single doctrine... It’s an evolving set of practices. At heart, we’re just a local design community committed to curiosity, learning, and the shared language of design.

Follow along.

☕

Enjoy a cup of coffee with us at the ICA Cafe.

Stick around to see the galleries afterwards.

About The Technology

Character Developer by Modern Ancients is a civic-intelligence design platform powered by VoiceBuild, letting community members, planners, developers, and city innovators speak insights directly into an AI that instantly turns them into maps, scorecards, prototypes, and shared tools… a way for anyone to translate lived experience into actionable design intelligence that cities can actually use.

Beta Launch, Coming Early 2026.

Design Thinking Method

Field Discovery

Enter the field, listen closely, and gather signals from lived experience before defining solutions.

Deep Sensemaking

Turn complexity into coherence by mapping systems, patterns, tensions, and leverage points.

Collaborative Creation

Prototype future possibilities with the people they affect and translate ideas into tangible experiments.

🟡 Field Discovery

Methods for entering the field, observing real conditions, and listening to human experience before you lock in a direction.

Discovery Practice

Field Immersion

Step into the environment to feel friction, flow, and emotional texture firsthand.

How it works... Spend time in the real setting... walking, watching, and informally interacting with people as everyday life unfolds.

What it reveals... The gap between policy and practice, small pain points that never make it into reports, and the emotional atmosphere of a place.

Discovery Practice

Narrative Interviews

Story-centered conversations that explore meaning, motivations, and tensions.

How it works... Invite people to tell stories about specific moments, decisions, and experiences rather than asking abstract questions.

What it reveals... Values, fears, tradeoffs, and the deeper logic behind how people act in real situations.

Discovery Practice

Quiet Observation

Low interference observing of people, spaces, and flows over time.

How it works... Watch activities, handoffs, and informal routines without intervening or prompting.

What it reveals... Unspoken norms, workarounds, points of friction, and how people actually move through a space.

Discovery Practice

Experience Logging

Participants record small moments over days or weeks in simple logs.

How it works... Ask people to note key moments, frustrations, delights, or questions as they go about their normal routines.

What it reveals... Longitudinal patterns, emotional spikes, and context that single sessions often miss.

Discovery Practice

Community Mapping

People map assets, issues, and opportunities in their own language.

How it works... Invite participants to place sticky notes, icons, or simple marks on a shared map representing what they see as important.

What it reveals... Perceived hotspots, blind spots, contested spaces, and where energy or concern is already gathering.

Discovery Practice

Signal Sampling

Capture small fragments... quotes, images, metrics... that hint at deeper patterns.

How it works... Collect snippets from conversations, photos, documents, and dashboards into a shared signal board.

What it reveals... Early weak signals, contradictions in the story, and areas that deserve deeper inquiry.

🟢 Deep Sensemaking

Methods for analyzing challenges and opportunities so teams can move from scattered insight to shared focus.

Sensemaking Practice

Stakeholder Constellations

Map people, institutions, and relationships as a living constellation.

How it works... List key actors and draw connections showing influence, information flows, and dependencies.

What it reveals... Power dynamics, allies, blockers, and who must be involved for change to last.

Sensemaking Practice

Journey Threads

Trace a journey across touchpoints, time, and emotional states.

How it works... Map key steps in a person or community's journey, along with highs, lows, questions, and breakdowns.

What it reveals... Where friction, confusion, and delight actually occur and where a new intervention could matter most.

Sensemaking Practice

Theme Clustering

Group related observations to surface emergent themes.

How it works... Put quotes, moments, and signals on sticky notes and cluster them by similarity.

What it reveals... Natural themes that arise from the data itself instead of categories imposed too early.

Sensemaking Practice

Priority Rings

Sort elements into must-have, important, and experimental.

How it works... Place items into three concentric rings that represent core, important, and optional elements.

What it reveals... What truly sits at the center of success versus what can flex, defer, or be dropped.

Sensemaking Practice

Impact–Effort Plotting

Compare opportunities by impact and effort to find leverage.

How it works... Place opportunities on a 2x2 grid of impact vs effort (or benefit vs difficulty).

What it reveals... Quick wins, big strategic bets, and activities that may not be worth the cost.

Sensemaking Practice

Story Reframing

Turn stuck problems into generative, forward-looking questions.

How it works... Rewrite issues as open questions such as "What would become possible if..." or "How might we..." with specific anchors.

What it reveals... New angles of attack, hidden assumptions, and a shared language for moving from complaint to possibility.

🔵 Collaborative Creation

Methods for generating concepts, prototyping them quickly, and communicating a future that could exist.

Co-Creation Practice

Idea Swarms

Generate many small ideas fast without judging them.

How it works... Set a short timer and have individuals or groups sketch, jot, or voice as many ideas as possible.

What it reveals... The full range of possibility before convergence and the ideas that keep resurfacing across people.

Co-Creation Practice

Perspective Shift

Solve the challenge from different roles, worlds, or time horizons.

How it works... Ask teams to design as if they were a different stakeholder, another city, or a future generation.

What it reveals... New logics, fresh design moves, and the constraints that are actually self-imposed.

Co-Creation Practice

Storyboard Futures

Sketch sequential scenes that show how life could look with the new idea in place.

How it works... Draw simple frames that follow a person or place as it interacts with the proposed solution.

What it reveals... Flow, emotional beats, and where the concept still has gaps or rough edges.

Co-Creation Practice

System Sketching

Rough diagrams of components, flows, and interactions in the solution.

How it works... Draw boxes, arrows, and simple labels to show how the solution actually works behind the scenes.

What it reveals... Assumptions about handoffs, bottlenecks, and where technology or people carry the load.

Co-Creation Practice

Rapid Prototyping

Build just enough to test a key assumption quickly.

How it works... Create a low-fidelity version of a feature, flow, or interaction that people can react to.

What it reveals... Whether the idea is legible, desirable, and directionally viable without heavy investment.

Co-Creation Practice

Concept Framing

Capture problem, insight, idea, and value on a single page.

How it works... Summarize each concept in a simple frame: the problem, the key insight, the proposal, and the benefits.

What it reveals... Which ideas have a clear story, which need refinement, and what should move forward into pilots.

Join us for a design thinking workshop at the Institute for Contemporary Art,

on Saturday, November 22nd, 2025, from 11AM-12:30PM.

RSVP for November 22nd

Building Cities with Character

Field Discovery

Deep Sensemaking

Collaborative Creation

The Building in Question

Intermediate Terminal Building, Circa 1939

Alexander Whiteway, M.S. | Facilitator

Ruth Lemma | Co-Host of Design Thinking RVA

Thurmond "T." Alford Jr., (MFA-DT) (C-MP/T) | Co-Host of Design Thinking RVA

About Design Thinking RVA

About The Technology

🟡 Field Discovery

🟢 Deep Sensemaking

🔵 Collaborative Creation

We look forward to co-creating with you at ICA Cafe.