design portfolio Rebecca Horton
Lowe’s Upskill Project From September 2016-July 2017, I worked with Lowe’s as the lead designer—and Acting Director from April-July—for the UpSkill Project, an initiative envisioned to activate Lowe’s purpose of helping its customers “love where they live.” UpSkill is a nationwide in-home experience where Lowe’s experts teach customers new DIY skills through a two-day project. The program was intended to activate Lowe’s purpose in a customer-facing way, as well as in a way that fired up our store staff nationwide. UpSkill has received national attention. The program was so successful that it was heavily featured at Lowe’s Mid-Year meeting in August as a leading company initiative. It was operationalized through a move to Lowe’s HR division in July. This blogpost does a great job of highlighting where the program is today.
MIT Sloan In 2015, I led a customer journey mapping project with MIT Sloan School of Management. The project involved four key components: a Kicko Workshop to gather context and build institution-wide momentum for the work, a two week Research Intensive whereby I taught a team of students design research methods and oversaw an ethnographic study that they conducted at the university, data modeling work by Trestles that involved an on-site Synthesis Workshop with a cross-functional stakeholder group and the iterative development and design of customer personas and customer journey maps visualizing high-level findings from the research, and a post-research Report Out session whereby we presented our findings to a group of 35 administrators. The project has since grown into an annual initiative at the university, in which the university ran a series of five pilots during the 2015-2016 school year, two of which will continue as full-fledged eorts.
MIT Process Photos
MIT Sample Deliverable
MIT Sample Deliverable
team facilitation and coaching Over the years, I have worked with a number of teams around team identity, organizational design, and even workplace design. Featured here is an organizational identity exercise I ran with one of my startup clients in 2015. My workshops are always custom-designed to suit client needs and I believe firmly in co-creating their objectives with the client team to foster solutions that fit their culture and their team dynamic.
rebecca horton rebecca@thetrestles.com
 rebeccahorton.net