Mount Vernon Ventures

The short version. From 2013 through 2021, Trey served as creative director for Mount Vernon Ventures, formerly the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation, working alongside a team of educators and innovators that included Bo Adams, TJ Edwards, Nicole Martin, Alex Blumencranz, Jim Tiffin, Chris Andres, and James Campbell. Together they shaped brand and marketing strategy, built the visual identity, and produced the marketing collateral, event collateral, and production support behind it, most notably Compass, a design-thinking and maker-education methodology, and the field guide that put it in educators’ hands.

Where they started. The Mount Vernon School had become nationally recognized for weaving design thinking, human-centered problem-solving, into its preschool-through-12th-grade curriculum. Its first version of that methodology was called DEEP. Mount Vernon Ventures grew out of an effort to monetize what the school was operationalizing internally: a consulting arm that could carry the school’s innovations in teaching and learning, operational strategy, and brand development out to other schools.

The move. After a few years running on DEEP, the Mount Vernon Ventures team set out to reimagine it, this time folding in maker design and engineering methods alongside the design-thinking core. The result was Compass: a methodology that taught the core concepts of Discover, Define, Design, and Deploy through the lenses of critique, ideation, and fabrication. Its flagship product was the Design Thinking Field Guide, a 70-page guide that walks designers through the process while keeping empathy, prototyping, and feedback at the center. Every one of its more than 30 graphic organizers came with directions for using it inside or outside the classroom, on its own or combined with others, and the guide laid out a beginner and an intermediate route so anyone new to design thinking had a place to start. Trey also designed the Flash Lab, a 90-minute introduction to design thinking that used a handful of those graphic organizers to teach the core principles of empathy, prototyping, and getting feedback from real users.

What we made:

• Brand and marketing strategy for Mount Vernon Ventures
• The visual identity and marketing collateral, including event collateral and production support
• Compass, the design-thinking and maker-education methodology
• The Design Thinking Field Guide, a 70-page guide with 30+ graphic organizers, beginner and intermediate routes included
• The Flash Lab, a 90-minute introductory design-thinking experience

What happened. The Compass field guide is now used in schools across the country and is recognized as one of the more robust design-thinking methods in education. Learn more about the field guide at mvventures.org.