For the complete list of the digital tools to assist virtual facilitation and workshopping, check out our guide to digital facilitation tools for online workshops and meetings. Finish up your workshop with clear next steps for the team. Continuing with the example of LoveFoundry, our imaginary online dating service, lets consider how you might construct the empathise phase. Our cake design process seeks to provide the answer in an engaging, experiential format. Other roles on the team can include a marketing expert, a design expert, and a financial expert., Now that you know exactly what a Design Thinking workshop is, lets dive into how you run one, step by step!, Whats the goal of your workshop? Activitydefine the activities and steps in the customers experience (15 minutes): Ask participants to write down all the steps they can think of that make up the users journey. Common approaches in Design Thinking include empathy maps, storyboards, activity networks and cluster matrices. Ask each participant to place a sticker on the idea they think is best. It is important to . A way in which this cake design process could be elaborated is in the context of creating the workshop alongside a schools Home Economics class, or other groups who regularly have access to kitchens and cooking equipment. In this section, well explore your Design Thinking workshop agenda in more detail. Part of the workshop will be dedicated to building low-fidelity prototypes, for which youll need a good selection of materials. Given the cross-functional nature of workshops, its often best to bring both executive summaries and raw data to workshops. Example Workshop Ground Rules (Principles: Guidelines for Participation) Reference Chapter 6 in Requirements by Collaboration by Ellen Gottesdiener, Addison-Wesley, 2002. Reflection and discussion (5 minutes): As a group, discuss what youve learned from the ideation phase so far. One of our favorite icebreaker activities was taught to us by our colleagues at Valtech Stockholm: In teams of 2, each participant must draw their teammate in one minute without looking at their sheet of paper or raising their pen. At the moment, this is a rather broad question. Using empathy maps and role-playing, encourage the group to get into the shoes of their target user. There might be one person sourcing the ingredients, another baking the cake and another delivering it to our Persona. Then lets go! These five stages of design thinking form an effective process for problem-solving that is useful for any team wanting to create better solutions and products. Take a user-centered approach and ask your participants for feedback. This is where your participants will narrow down the broader design challenge (how might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers?) For example: A busy, middle-aged professional needs an easy way of meeting like-minded people in the local area. If youre running a workshop for a client, you might print display advertising campaigns from three of their biggest competitors, for example. Ground rules are monitored by the whole group, for the group. When tackling this somewhat tricky task, there are two golden rules to bear in mind: It might be tempting to cram in as much as possible, but the workshop will just end up feeling rushedwhich is not conducive to creativity! Design thinking consists of five key stages which well explore in this workshop: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. As a participant in a Design Thinking workshop, you are responsible for arriving in the right design thinking mindset. Its important that the group understand the mindset and that they can reflect on real-life scenarios they could apply Design Thinking to. For more complex problems, we might revisit previous stages, and create further prototypes using our deeper understanding. 14 Ground Rules for Team Meetings . 1. This role can be filled by an in-house facilitator or an external or freelance facilitator who seeks to guide team members towards a common objective via the Design Thinking process., There are pros and cons to both internal and external facilitation., While an internal facilitator benefits from knowledge of the product and company and has established relationships with the team, they might struggle with objectivity, find it hard to build trust with the team, and avoid asking pointed questions., An external facilitator, on the other hand, is likely to remain detached from internal power struggles and find it easier to remain uninfluenced by existing relationships with the team. Like any design project, be sure to continuously iterate and improve upon your Design Thinking workshop. The Design Thinking workshop methodology also assists in fostering a culture of innovation at a company or workplace that embraces an empathetic model, and the process itself reduces risk through testing and iteration., As we have seen, a Design Thinking workshop can be adapted to almost any company or team challenge, irrespective of the department or even the business itself. We focus on quantity, not quality and even half-baked ideas can be contributed to the discussion. Well here are our handpicked tips. If you are new to the world of workshop facilitation, you can apply some Design Thinking principles to the process itself. Chances are you have. The sponsor has to provide a concrete and well described challenge to work with, a topic is not enough, and agree in the main deliverable. No, the great thing about design thinking is its accessibility! Summaries can be shared early in the session to quickly level-set, while raw data can be referenced during activities or decision making. Below, Ive collected a few more tips you might find useful if you are using your own design or trying another approach entirely. The level of detail you decide to document your workshop with should be based on the scale of your project short Design Thinking sessions with a core team dont require the same level of scrutiny as larger projects with extended teams who meet infrequently. Well walk you through the key stages of the template and offer some tips to help you along the way. Rich user personas are the hallmark of Design Thinking, and an excellent way to articulate detailed behavioral information about whom youre designing for. What is a meaningful problem statement? Where did the insights come from? If time permits, allow 15-20 minutes at the start of every day for icebreaker activities or energizing moments. By keeping in mind what, why and how for each Design Thinking stage and contextualizing the topic into something relatable, we can give clarity on Design Thinking and deliver it as simply as a piece of cake. Depending on the size of the challenge and the goals and needs of the individuals taking part, a workshop can take place over a few hours or up to a week if needed and is adaptable to both remote and in-person work settings. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apples iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Dynamic groups who are used to problem-solving may come up with an idea straight away, and decide that they are definitely going to run with that as their solution. This exercise sits in the Ideate phase, but could equally be called a Defining process, as we are refining our project further, proving again the nonlinear nature of Design Thinking and the freedom to adapt it for our requirements. To build trust, start by creating ground rules for the workshop. the stakes, the business objectives and your client's needs will make you not only a relevant facilitator, but a good facilitator. Well yes, you must: Okay, but then "how can I be all of this at once?" Through the idea vault process, we are narrowing our ideas down by asking a series of questions that relate to the feasibility of the design, and if it truly meets our Personas needs. Create a space where everyone can have their voice heard, and where no question is a stupid question. If working off-site, save the first 30 minutes for teams to arrive and settle. Are we designing how we think?, one person asks. Youll want to stock up on white copy paper, colored paper, pencils, marker pens, Post-It notes of different colors, sticky tape, and whiteboards.. This will allow the project to obtain greater internal support, since all the stakeholders will have been involved from the get-go. Whether brand new to the idea or a design professional, this way of thinking and collaborating, can often give us innovative, surprising and ground-breaking solutions to the challenges we face every day. As the facilitator of a Design Thinking workshop, you are responsible for helping teams challenge assumptions, discover actionable insights, and arrive at innovative outcomes. Many make genuine efforts to be innovativethey spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. Having gone through the users challenges in the previous exercise, the group is in a better position to go into more detail with the issue itself. It is often useful to suggest questions that participants might wish to use, and give examples of open questions. 10 Ground Rules . Activityadd functionality to mobile screens (15 minutes): Now participants will turn their sketches into low-fidelity paper prototypes by adding functionality. Design Thinking activities, such as empathy maps and user stories are a convenient way for organizing detailed user research. For example, a cupcake is designed to be eaten by one person, a low-cost treat that doesnt warrant a special occasion. Originally from England, Emily moved to Berlin after studying French and German at university. Does your team need to discover new opportunities? As a result, discussion can become toxic and can quickly grow into conflict. Despite . Its worth suggesting to the team to use one piece of paper to represent each screen so that mistakes can be easily rectified and the journey is easy for everyone to follow.. This step is all about gathering useful feedback: Are the ideas good? (These are in no particular order. To conclude, I wanted to give you one last little tip as a bonus. This can be a brief presentation covering the following points: By now, youve set the scene and put everybody at ease. Another common error is to focus too heavily on presentations. In our design thinking for beginners guide, we explore how you can introduce design thinking by asking a group to solve the simple challenge of baking a cake. Did the team have any feedback for you as the facilitator? Crucially, an external facilitator is likely to feel more free to openly question the status quo., Crucially, the facilitator should be able to clearly explain to the group the importance of following the process, provide a clear picture of what team members can expect during the workshop, and be able to outline the results the workshop will bring., The team for your Design Thinking workshop will depend on the size of the company, the scale of the challenge at hand, and the capacity of individual team members. , you can apply some design Thinking include empathy maps and role-playing, encourage the group get... 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