This week, the SF team joined together virtually to catch up and have a bit of fun together with a Cocktail Competition for SF Happy Hour! In these times, it’s essential, especially as a creative team, to stay connected and uphold the same spirit of collaborative innovation and optimism even from our basements and home offices. Our weekly SF Happy Hour is just one of the many ways we do that while we’re locked down due to COVID19 here in Michigan.

The Cocktail Competition required extra ingenuity from the team as many of us have avoided visiting grocery stores and are very low on ingredients! The covetable prize for the competition winner was one of Jeevak’s gallery mounted prints of his bird photography.

Honorable mentions included a “Boozy Margarita” from Grey, and a delicious Dandy from David. However the prize went to David Byron for his “Corona Michelada”! He’ll receive his prize, a beautiful photo of a Blue Jay, once we’re all physically together again.

Great design studios will affirm to you this importance of maintaining team togetherness, wether physically or virtually. This all-important factor is what allows the flexibility to throw new design ideas at each other right then and there, or have a group huddle to blast through a particular design challenge at a moment’s notice. Before the coronavirus pandemic, we always encouraged our team at Sundberg-Ferar to be physically at the studio for work as much as possible. This immediacy is what allows cross-pollination of ideas and the industrial design thinking that fuels innovation. It lets the team’s different perspectives gel and build on one another quickly. It’s those impromptu conversations, water cooler chats, design critiques, and collisions of thought that generate “aha moments”. Even brief times of silliness together or of considering a seemingly impossible or ridiculous idea often serve as the foundation for some of the most unexpected, yet best ideas; truly novel solutions for design problems.

That’s why, at SF, we’ve recreated the same environment of collaboration, spontaneous industrial design powwows, and innovation with a variety of remote methods and virtual team gatherings throughout the week. We stand ready to help your business during the COVID-19 pandemic, (whether in innovation strategy & planning, new product development, research, or beyond), to fuel your growth with the power of industrial design thinking and the human-centric design approach.

Want to talk shop about design and innovation with us now? Drop us a note at hello@sundbergferar.com!