The immense impact of seeing for yourself - IRL field trips

We are inundated with videos, articles, shorts, articles, friends' messages, and many times the impact is as fleeting as the time spent perusing the message. Thats why the impact of well-designed in-person interactions can be so high.

This past weekend I got a chance to spend a bunch of hours with some Technovation girls at Intuitive with some incredibly warm and generous Intuitive employees. The goal was to encourage the girls to finish their prototypes, power through their Technovation submissions and see how similar their innovation journeys were to the design process of the Intuitive engineers.

Since many of us still work from home, its been harder to coordinate in-person field trips for students to various corporations and this is a plea to industry partners to consider opening a few weekend days in the year for local students to visit and see for themselves what it is like to tackle big problems, to innovate - IRL.

It was so incredible to see the impact this field trip had on the Technovation girls and their parents. It was inspiring to see the various prototypes of the robotic arm that Intuitive has been developing and to see how long it took to get to the current version.

But most importantly, they got to sit down and chat with warm, encouraging Intuitive employees who also shared what they worked on each day. Thank you Raje Srinivasan , Annie L. , Krithika Muralidharan , Patrice Hicks?Mattie Farris, CCDS?Claire McCarthy?Nazia Podana?Alexis Farrer?Honey Dayani?Krithika Muralidharan?Chetana Bayas?Victoria Figueroa?Patrice Hicks?Intuitive Foundation?May Q. Liu, PhD!

The girls were able to see a path between what they were working on and their future selves. And I know that these girls were motivated to push through and "ship" their innovations thanks to the personal encouragement they received.

At the moment, there is no technology that can result in this type of warm and inspiring human connection. We need to intentionally design and build for this.