New Design-Focused Event Seeks to Bridge Toronto and KW Communities

The folks at Heist, Boltmade and GRAND are teaming up to launch the first “Method Jam” event in Toronto, which will seek to explore better ways for clients and agencies to produce great things together. More than that, the organizers want it to bridge the gap between thinkers in the Toronto area and the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

The first of a planned series of free events will be hosted on Wednesday night at 141 Bathurst street, aimed at designers, developers or project managers interested in learning how to run a leaner, more collaborative design process.

We chatted with Robert Hayes and Tom Creighton of Toronto’s Heist, a team of researchers and designers who seek to build great customer experiences with a considered balance between emotion and logic. Hayes started it with his brother under two years ago after working in advertising, which was “a good exposure to the wrong way of doing things and that set us off into trying to figure our a better way.”

They began doing strategy work with Telus designing a more customer centric design process for their product development process, which lead to the creation of a team. After that they helped design Telus’ new website and its customer portals.

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 2.35.24 PM

“The basis of what Heist stands for is we want to build things that people are actually going to use, so we bring customers into the process early and often, we talk to the customers when we have ideas, sketches and prototypes and we’re trying to get customer to break those ideas and iterate on things every step of the way,” said Hayes.

The guys felt that sort of ethos isn’t being discussed enough among startups in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, and so they came up with Method Jam.

“We’re seeing an emerging model for newer agencies or creative people in general that’s much more collaborative and more focused on bringing everyone into the creative fold, rather than the old model of sort of disappearing for a week and coming back and saying ‘tadaa,'” said Creighton.

GRAND and Boltmade shared the same vision for an event that will get people talking, borrowing concepts from the startup world and using them in the service/agency world.

The organizers hope to continue to hold Method Jams if the first one goes well, and even use it as a place to connect designers in both Toronto and KW.

One reply on “New Design-Focused Event Seeks to Bridge Toronto and KW Communities”