Looking back at Refresh Conference

In the last week of January, Sandbox took part in the design-oriented Refresh Conference. Here's Yana sharing her thoughts on what transpired in the Sandbox booth.

For our booth at Refresh, we designed a unique 10 minutes workshop. With this workshop, we aimed to familiarise participants of the conference with the Design Thinking framework, which we practice at Sandbox. We asked them to go through the empathy-building exercise, presented them with facts about the problem, and asked them to build a rapid prototype. Since we were free to choose the topic for our workshop, we decided to focus on something that could have a positive social impact and selected Dyslexia for our topic.

To our delight, we saw a great interest in our workshop. Tens of people participated and, in just 10 minutes, were able to prototype a solution. We hope our small workshop raised both interest in Design Thinking and awareness of Dyslexia among participants.

*If you want to go through our empathy-building exercise, try it out via this link https://sandbox-dyslexia.vercel.app/. We are not claiming that we know how it feels to be dyslexic, but we always attempt to put ourselves in others' shoes before we jump to the solutions. Empathy first!

In addition, Maria took to the big stage to talk to the wider audience about what Sandbox even is. She also invited people to the Sandbox workshop at our common rooms on Friday, which ended up a very popular event! And of course, by a twist of fate, we also celebrated our Sandbox birthday on Friday evening with our friends from both close and abroad. Work hard, play hard, right?

If you missed us at Refresh, don't worry! Sandbox has plenty of events to come in the future. And of course, if you should want to collaborate with us, don't hesitate to contact us! We're always looking for new partners to bring their real-world problems to our fresh minded students.