The Department of Design at The Ohio State University is pleased to host alumnus Surya Vanka for a two-day Design Swarm workshop focused on seeking new solutions to Ohio’s opioid crisis. This event will function as its first annual Reinhart Butter Design Affair. A presentation by Surya Vanka will take place on Friday, October 20th from 10:15-11:15 am in 010 Page Hall. The workshop will take place following the presentation in 105 Hayes Hall from 1-5 pm and again on Saturday, Oct. 21st from 10-4 pm.Lunch will be provided.

What is a Design Swarm? This facilitated approach to examining complex social problems relies on the collaborative power of people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and levels of experience. Surya Vanka, founder and principle of Authentic Design (Seattle) and former UX director at Microsoft, will lead us through a nine hour, two-day workshop process based on sessions that function as timed sprints that may feel like controlled chaos, but the proactive sense of urgency they generate is leveraged to generate a wide range of highly visual and collaborative proposals for innovative new ways to solve challenges that have a strong sense of local relevance. By bringing together people with different points of view to share ideas, the process encourages the exploration of extremes: extreme agility, extreme creativity, and extreme collaboration. In the end, Design Swarms have a proven ability to identify connections, processes and previously unseen possibilities to solve some of today’s biggest challenges.