Wond’ry x Nissan: Mapping Innovation
Alphachimp LLC worked with The Wond’ry project team to design and illustrate a physical map that describes a yearlong collaboration between faculty, students, staff, and transportation industry innovators.
As Vanderbilt University’s Innovation Center, The Wond’ry provides students, faculty, staff, and community members with the tools and resources to bring ideas to life.
They work across four practice areas: Making & Design, Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Design Strategy, and Social Innovation.
Headquartered just outside Nashville, Tennessee, Nissan North America partnered with The Wond'ry to drive innovation, harness cutting-edge design, and apply empathy-driven solutions to redefine industry challenges and transform academic engagement.
This partnership is part of a larger ongoing collaboration with the Wond’ry to provide Nissan with a structured framework and prototyping resources to enhance its innovation development capabilities.
The Final Product
click thumbnails below for larger view
Our goal? To surprise & delight!
At first, our project brief was to create a single poster-sized infographic for a 15-minute presentation of the yearlong project.
However, in exploring options, we suggested creating a physical printed piece—similar to an old school road map—which The Wond’ry Team could put directly into the hands of the Nissan team.
Plus, it gives the executives something they would be excited to show their family back home!!
The Collaborative Design Process
Over eight weeks, working virtually as a design team, we used a collaborative Miro Board to:
Collect brand standards, fonts, and colors
Post reference photos and inspiration
Share content and printer specs
Iterate layout design and template
Refine and approve final print versions
The Wond’ry x Nissan Collaboration
Initiatives undertaken by Nissan North America (NNA) Product Planning (PRODT) and Vanderbilt University's Wond'ry during their first year of partnership.
These projects spanned a wide array of focus areas, each tailored to advance Nissan’s strategic goals:
Process innovation
Customer-centric health and wellness
Enhanced user experience design
AI-driven tools
Project Mojo
Addressed the skill disparity within the NNA PRODT team by implementing a comprehensive approach involving surveys, shadowing, interviews, and workshops. This project successfully enhanced the team's ability to tackle innovation barriers and fostered a culture of proactive product planning.
Nissan Innovation Bank
A series of structured educational courses, including a capstone pitching masterclass, were designed to refine the PRODT team's innovative capacities, ensuring effective use of the newly developed electronic Nissan Innovation Platform.
2023 GEMBA Week
Featured immersive projects focusing on direct consumer interaction and practical testing. Teams engaged users to better understand the needs surrounding health and wellness and the functionality of multi-row vehicles. This direct engagement provided invaluable insights into consumer behavior and preferences.
Nissan AI Chatbox
Developed a conversational chatbot to sift through extensive historical survey data to predict future trends, despite facing significant data and tool usage challenges. This AI tool has notably improved Nissan's capability to forecast customer needs and tailor their strategic responses.
Health & Wellness Innovation
Explored varying customer expectations across different driving scenarios to integrate health and wellness features effectively into vehicle designs. The collaboration with Vanderbilt’s Medical Health Panel enriched the project with expert medical insights, translating into actionable design directives.
2024 Touch the Market GEMBA Week
Participants gained firsthand experience of customer preferences through active use of various vehicle types, aligning product development with authentic customer feedback and enhancing global market strategies.
“With your help, we communicated that the Nissan team needs to see and play with a world of loosely defined and roughly articulated ideas. Your illustration style invokes that playfulness so deeply.”
— Dr. David Owens | Evans Family Executive Director of the Wond'ry
About The Wond’ry
More at: www.vanderbilt.edu/the-wondry
As Vanderbilt’s Innovation Center…
The Wond’ry provides tools to innovate and collaborate, making involvement in various challenges and opportunities throughout the year possible.
Beginning with the earliest stages of an idea’s development, The Wond’ry provides a continuum of entrepreneurial supports that empower participants with an evidence-based process for idea evaluation and business model development.
The Wond’ry provides students, faculty, staff, and community members with the tools and resources to bring ideas to life. They do this across four practice areas:
Making & Design
Entrepreneurship
Innovation & Design Strategy
Social Innovation
Innovation & Design Strategy | Want to transform innovation challenges into impactful solutions?
The Innovation and Design Strategy practice area offers Wond’ry community members, including students and industry partners, the opportunity to learn proven approaches to tackling innovation challenges.
They teach techniques for generating effective solutions that support positive change in teams, organizations, and society.
Making & Design | Want to Create and Test Ideas?
The Wond’ry features four Makerspaces:
Emerging Tech Lab
Fiber Arts Build Lab
Electrical Makerspace
Mechanical Makerspace
They offer rapid prototyping resources from hand tools to sewing machines to 3D printers and laser cutting, along with the training and guidance to make your ideas real.
Social Innovation | Want to Make a Difference?
At the Wond’ry, we believe that Social Innovation is not the responsibility of just one place or individual.
It means bringing together people and organizations of diverse backgrounds to co-create new opportunities to support lasting, meaningful transformation in our communities.
Entrepreneurship | Want to Start a Venture?
Beginning with the earliest stages of an idea’s development, the Wond’ry provides a continuum of entrepreneurial supports that empower participants with an evidence-based process for idea evaluation and business model development.
Are you looking for help in designing and illustrating
your own visual explainer?
CONTACT US.
