Roles
Design Research
Ethnography
Storytelling
Interaction Design
Design Thinking + Facilitation
Context
Internship
June 2022-Present
Overview
In the summer of 2022 I joined the Insights to Innovation (i2i) team at 3M as a Design Research intern. i2i is a small internal innovation unit comprised of strategists, futurists, researchers, coaches, and facilitators that drive human-centered new platform exploration and development. By leveraging trends & foresight, design thinking, and lean startup mindsets & toolsets, our team confronts ambiguity and change, explores new opportunity spaces, and pursues global transformational innovation.

Contributions
Interactive storytelling of innovation platforms
During my internship, I had an opportunity to immerse in diverse domains encompassing healthcare, home improvement and care, consumer health care, and personal safety to name a few. Living at the intersection of design, research, facilitation, and business strategy, I spearheaded a project focused on designing interactive storytelling experiences and strategic communication of novel platform opportunities. This involved synthesizing complex qualitative research to weave together expansive bodies of work, to convey and inspire exploration of macro trend opportunity spaces.
Exploratory workshop and research support
As the only Design Research intern, I collaborated with other teams across the company to provide support and help define research phases. In particular, work on the heuristic review of an internal scheduling app helped that business team make better decisions regarding the scope of work that lay ahead of them.
I supported the design, facilitation, and documentation of workshops across multidisciplinary teams. Highlights included designing and facilitating a workshop to help representatives from various divisions re-envision the Future of Healthcare, live-sketching and visual mapping to clarify and create a mutual point of reference.
Design thinking and leadership
I also worked on a 20% project, leading a group design thinking project to ensure that we continued to focus on the most salient aspects of the nebulous project we were tasked with.


Reflections
My time at 3M has been an invaluable experience in wrangling ambiguity and complexity. I'm constantly amazed at how many new things I've found myself fascinated by, and have been lucky to feed that curiosity as part of the job. I've been able to collaborate with some incredibly passionate, dedicated, genuine people, and I know I'll hold those experiences close.