An actress and an architect walk into a bar. For those of you who know us, we come from very different backgrounds. Faith – an actor who spent more than half of her life “walking in other people’s shoes”. Stacy – an architect who learned she didn’t want to wear “an architect’s shoes” (the all black thing, it’s just too much). From the outside, we may look like the odd couple, but truth be told it’s our differing yet overlapping perspectives and passions that make PinPoint what it is today. The story began, not at a bar, but at one of the most prominent design thinking agencies in Chicago using human-centered research & design to improve the fortunes of the Fortune 500s. Faith was known for her innate ability to guide clients and her team through the art of connecting, researching and storytelling. Stacy was known for her talent to design a future not yet imagined driven by the research findings Faith and team were gathering. Our skills were not only complimentary, they were made for the other. One successful project led to another until we were essentially inseparable. All that time together got us thinking. What if we could take some of the pain points we witnessed and turn them into PIN points? (Yes – that is actually where we got our name.) As two women, born and raised in Chicago, the dream was to evolve the design thinking principles we had developed for Fortune 500s and make them accessible for people like us - women leaders looking to make an impact via a product, a service, an environment or technology. With that dream, we created PinPoint Collective - a research & design agency with a mission to advance female leaders and create inclusive communities by making design thinking equally accessible. Our Pin Model simplifies design thinking making it easy to innovate project by project or year by year.