Team Retreats at GIX
Spark your team’s creativity and camaraderie with a hands-on and in-person teambuilding retreat at GIX. Whether in our makerspace or while applying our ‘design-build-adjust’ approach to finding innovative solutions, your team will enjoy learning, connecting, and creating together.
Every team is different. Let us design a retreat that meets the unique needs or interests of yours, or explore some examples of retreat options below.
Quick Facts
Length: Half or full day
Format: In-person
Location: GIX Steve Ballmer Building
Cost: Contact us for a quote.
Delivering Innovation In A Distributed Team
Gail actionable tools that will improve your distributed team’s ability to perform, innovate, and collaborate remotely.
How it works:
In a series of small discussions and exercises held virtually, participants will explore concepts and practices to draw out employee creativity and innovation wherever they work. Learn how to encourage people to have “hallway conversations” when hallways don’t connect them.
Individual Making in a Team Environment
Explore fabricating together in the GIX makerspace.
How it works:
Each team preselects an item they would like to build from a catalog of available projects. Participants customize the design and build their own versions of the project using both pre-made components and parts they create using makerspace tools.
Group Making / Engineering Challenge
Team members work together in small groups to design, build, and compete in a design/making challenge.
How it works:
Participants break into teams and address a design/making challenge using a variety of materials and tools from the GIX Prototyping Labs. When complete, each design will be tested to see which is the most successful in addressing the challenge.
Critical Making / Design Thinking
Teams design and pitch prototypes they developed as a result of a design thinking process and critical evaluation of technology solutions.
How it works:
Participants, working in small groups, will evaluate an existing product or service, reinterpret it through new values-based lenses, then design and develop a new alternative product or service that addresses these values. Teams will build rough formal prototypes and “pitch” their new products and services to the larger group at the end of the day.
‘Exquisite Corpse’
Teams practice defining problems and developing solutions when they don’t control the entire process in this fun twist on the 19th century parlor game ‘Exquisite Corpse.’
How it works:
Groups work together to define a problem space, identify social and value systems critical to the project, determine which technologies could be deployed in the solution, then develop ideas for a product or service that addresses the combined parameter set. At each phase, groups hand off their work to a new team and use the results of another team’s previous stage as their starting point. The final solutions are creative, surprising and lead to insights on the joys and challenges of innovating in teams.
