During this time, teams work through various activities that help model their users, define requirements and develop experiences. What went well? Important workshop ground rules require that everyone is engaged and on the same page. A Design Thinking workshop will spark innovation, foster a user-centric mindset, and get cross-functional teams working together to design a great product. 9 Ground Rules for Retrospectives. For details about the different steps and activities involved, see the Design Thinking process guide. Now for the most crucial part: planning your workshop agenda. This might seem obvious by now, but in the excitement of the workshop, its easy to forget who this is really for! Based on what they observed in the previous activity, theyll fill in each quadrant with hypothetical (or direct) quotes and observations. If we designed our workshop to run over a longer period, the group may wish to explore ideas further, by discovering recipes and cake designs. To build trust, start by creating ground rules for the workshop. For example, in these work sessions, respecting the duration of each activity is essential. It's an extremely efficient way of solving pressing product-related issues. With your objectives in mind, you can begin the planning process. They are always participatory, and employ a range of activities designed to generate ideas (divergence) and make decisions (convergence). This is a good point to break for ten minutes before diving into the first activity. With your agenda in place, you should now have a good idea of what youll need for the workshop. Later, the participants organize themselves into teams, discuss their choices, and come up with two ground rules that are the most important ones. A Design Thinking workshop should be largely activity-based; your participants need to be hands-on and engaged. This is the time to ask the group to come together to write a detailed problem statement. If you are in charge of delivering a summary of the work done, start it immediately after the workshop, while the information is still fresh in your mind. Discuss the results of preparatory UX research, technical audits, and other data gathered in preparation. Does your team need to discover new opportunities? Unlike a traditional presentation, the slides of a facilitation deck are designed to guide collaboration and generate discussion. It includes detailed logistics and clearly outline the intentions of the workshop and its desired outcomes. BE CLEAR: this rule applies to any project, but it is particularly important for a workshop considering the limited allocated time. Encourage Wild Ideas Embrace the most out-of-the-box notions. Remind the group to keep coming back to the Empathy part of the Design Thinking process and use empathy maps and user stories as practical ways to keep the user at the center of the session. Its very useful for participants to understand exactly what is meant by a prototype, and that it is not a near-finished product. It is important to . Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Using Post-it notes, theyll describe the functionality of each button; for example adds item to basket. A good workshop facilitator must know how to get the word out within the company aboutthe beneficial effects of Design Thinking on collaboration and on a customer-centric culture. If our Persona character was a strong supporter of local business, that may play a part in where the cake ingredients were sourced. To keep your attendees relaxed, comfortable, and free to be creative, keep the following checklist in mind while selecting and preparing your workshops location:, The importance of writing a good workshop agenda should never be underestimated. We'll get into what these look like in practice a little later on, but first let's take a look at what they mean in theory and why they're important to the Design Thinking process . Bake two small cupcake versions to taste-test with our end-user. Ready to run an unforgettable Design Thinking workshop? I use examples of Personas, explaining that they could be based on one person, and therefore be very real, or if they use the data from several people, they can create a fictional character with whom they will empathize and keep in mind throughout the design journey. Design thinking is a great methodology for bringing human-centered thinking to your team. Based on the five phases of Design Thinking, a Design Thinking workshop focuses on: Empathy: Getting to grips with a real user problem and building empathy for the target users / customers. The great thing about these exercises is that you have the freedom to expand them to work with your audience and how best suits their needs. She has spent the last seven years working in tech startups, immersed in the world of UX and design thinking. Select a program, get paired with an expert mentor and tutor, and become a job-ready designer, developer, or analyst from scratch, or your money back. Whatever the challenge is that youre hoping to solve with the workshop, have it defined well in advance so that everyone is on the same page from the start. Design Thinking is a process or strategy for developing design concepts and solving problems that centers around the product's user and their needs. ), How to run the design thinking for beginners workshop, How baking a cake can explain design thinking, A step-by-step guide to planning a workshop, An honest* guide to facilitating hybrid events. Well walk you through the key stages of the template and offer some tips to help you along the way. Sometimes the best sources of inspiration connect seemingly unrelated industries. This email is also your opportunity to assign any relevant pre-work, such as an ask to bring specific design inspirations. After reviewing decisions, end with a project roadmap to place the workshop in context. Most people learn by using the process in relation to a specific problem, you dont have to use the cake baking analogy. The works of art can then be displayed in the workshop room, for your viewing pleasure! During this stage, the steps from the user journey will be used to create individual screens or interfaces, including buttons and other interaction points or functionality. What kind of projects do you think this workshop could relate to? Lastly, if time permits, use the last few minutes of your workshop to take inventory of what youve accomplished during the time spent together and inform the participants of the next steps in the project. A user journey map is a visual representation of the process that a user goes through in order to accomplish a specific goal. As Mary Poppins put it so well. A Design Thinking workshop is a collaborative session that is focused on the five phases of Design Thinking. After sharing the design context, invite participants to challenge and discuss the existing user personas. Congratulations: youve just conducted an engaging, informative, and extremely valuable Design Thinking workshop! Lastly in our workshop, we celebrate by selecting a final cake outcome. Activitysharing ideas and getting feedback (10 minutes): Ask participants to pair up and share their ideas. One of the reasons for its popularity is, Join the 100.000 facilitators using SessionLab, 2022 TrainedOn O Voolu tn 20a, Tallinn, 10918 Tallinn, Estonia support@sessionlab.com. Here are some of the benefits at a glance: Most companies today have innovation envy. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor) and what journey (the scenario) you'll be mapping ahead of time. Running a successful Design Thinking workshop means ensuring the team has everything they need to make informed decisions in real-time. Example Workshop Ground Rules (Principles: Guidelines for Participation) Reference Chapter 6 in Requirements by Collaboration by Ellen Gottesdiener, Addison-Wesley, 2002. Display the ground rules so that they're visible to everyone. 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. A Design Thinking workshop seeks to overcome these challenges through a defined process that is designed to improve the problem-solving skills of the team, facilitate innovation, allocate time and space for significant collaboration between team members, build empathy, identify opportunities, define requirements, and develop ideas. Youll also need to incorporate an introduction, an ice-breaker activity to get the group warmed up, and sufficient breaks throughout. In this guide, well show you how to run an effective design thinking workshop. Essentially, a Design Thinking workshop seeks to create solutions to challenges facing the business. If time permits, allow 15-20 minutes at the start of every day for icebreaker activities or energizing moments. Activityadd functionality to mobile screens (15 minutes): Now participants will turn their sketches into low-fidelity paper prototypes by adding functionality. Ideally, youll have a separate table for all the materials and equipment (more on that in step three!). Also, don't hesitate to delegate certain tasks to the participants. Here are some suggestions: Make sure you also get each team member to say their name and what their role will be in the workshop, too!, Although some of the group will be aware of Design Thinking and its principles, its still worth making a brief presentation on what Design Thinking is for those who are unfamiliar with the concept or are unsure of what it looks like in practice. What ideation technique will the group be using today, and how does it work? When preparing your workshop, insist that the list of participants include representatives of all the teams affected by the issue to be resolved. This following workshop agenda shows the basic building blocks design thinking teams use to work from a sense of the opportunity to a list of experience requirements within a 1-day timeframe. Has everybody identified similar user needs, or is there lots of variety? Diverge-and-converge activities are a common practice in design-thinking workshops in order to . However, Design Thinking workshops arent just for designers; they are also increasingly used to teach professionals how to innovate and problem-solve. There might be one person sourcing the ingredients, another baking the cake and another delivering it to our Persona. We based ourselves on our recent experience: week long workshops to rethink customer experiences, involving up to thirty participants. 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. Its important to encourage all ideas, no matter how big or small, and we will set an anything is possible mindset. Design Thinking workshops are gaining popularity due to being interesting as well as informative and fun. Identify your skills, refine your portfolio, and attract the right employers. How to run the design thinking for beginners workshop How baking a cake can explain design thinking Step 1: Empathize Step 2: Define Step 3: Ideate Step 4: Prototype Step 5: Test Tips for teaching design thinking How to run the design thinking for beginners workshop So, to not paraphrase what is already out there, I sat down with my partner in workshops,and we established a list of our key tips. Defer Judgment: Creative spaces are judgment-free zonesthey let ideas flow so people can build from each other's great ideas. Reflection and discussion (5 minutes): As a group, discuss what youve learned from the ideation phase so far. This rule can be used to encourage participants to come up with big ideas, without considering the practical constraints of day-to-day life. While these sources of insight are highly project specific, consider the following four areas as a starting point. Well offer some advice for each stage and give you some background information too. You can learn all about, Activitycraft a point of view (10 minutes): Based on their empathy maps from the empathise phase, ask participants to create a point of view statement. The current landscape is living research document that helps teams understand the feasibility and viability of their ideas by answering three critical questions: The information required to address these questions must be identified and collected prior to the workshop, as it will be discussed early in the day and referenced repeatedly throughout. Select those that are appropriate to your group's needs. you might ask yourself. We rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo. Third Rule of Design Thinking In phase one, we went through some general pointers to consider when devising the workshop agenda. By following the workshop template, youll find a heap of tips and tricks for teaching design thinking to a new group. Activitycreate an empathy map (10 minutes): Each participant divides their page into four quadrants: says, thinks, does, and feels. If youd like some examples of design thinking in the real world, check this out: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking. We help businesses and brands succeed in the digital age. Join the 100,000+ facilitators using SessionLab. Design thinking is a highly iterative process, where insights from one activity often reframe the original opportunity. Required fields are marked *, Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. When introducing design thinking to a group, the best place to start is by answering the question, what is design thinking? Because the quality of your facilitation during the workshop is a determining factor of the success of your project and of your clients satisfaction. This might be a good time to share some interesting statsfor example: teams that are applying IBMs Design Thinking practices have, A real-world Design Thinking case study, such as, Presentation (10 minutes): What is empathy? Before you prepare the agenda, consider the high-level objectives. Lets consider the benefits of a Design Thinking workshop in more detail. Why do we need to create one, and what steps are involved? Activityrefining your solution (10 minutes): Incorporating what theyve learned about the user and the feedback they received on their initial ideas, its time for the Design Thinkers to pull everything into one single solution. What data was used to inform them? Well here are our handpicked tips. For example: How might we provide an easy, safe, online dating experience?. The cross-functional collaboration will consistently bring about the most innovative and bring about the most effective solution to your users problem., 3. If your workshop takes place over several days, take the time necessary at the end of each day to write down the big ideas of the day. Thus, a workshop expected to deliver on all four objectives should likely run for 2 days or longer, if the team is new or have never solved together before. At the moment, this is a rather broad question. Its important that the group understand the mindset and that they can reflect on real-life scenarios they could apply Design Thinking to. The purpose of a Design Thinking workshop is to get people thinking outside the box, so be sure to set up a space that invites creativity. Start by welcoming everybody to the workshop and setting expectations. We're here to help with this collection of simple and effective team building activities! Feel free to mix up ideas that will keep your workshop engaging! When preparing your workshop, insist that the list of participants include representatives of all the teams affected by the issue to be resolved. Why? Where did the insights come from? Note the inspiration doesnt have to be apples to apples with your current project. 3. A good workshop facilitator must know how to get the word out within the company about. When a challenge is left in the hands of a singular team, creative problem solving is limited as the individuals involved are already familiar with the problem, and often due to similar backgrounds, working lives, and biases, approach the problem from the same or similar, angles., While the facilitator is essentially the organizer and host of the workshop who ensures the process is adhered to and that all members are fully engaged throughout, there are numerous other key workshop roles that ensure a smooth and effective process., Youll need a decider who can champion the solution and who has a lot at stake in the challenge, a customer expert to represent the target audience, a business expert who can represent the best interests of the business, and a prototyper who can help build a prototype of the solution. Make a note of these answers so that your workshops continue to improve steadily over time., Heres a shortlist of what to keep in mind at all times while running your Design Thinking workshop!. 1 day, 9:00 AM 5:00 PM), Add time for introductions, lunch and breaks (15 to 60 min), Identify Design Thinking steps for each block (ex. When the statements been written, take a moment to have a brief reflection and discussion on what everybody has learned so far. If you plan to use this workshop agenda, do you see it as a stand-alone learning, or as a starting point for further exploration? Lets get started. No, the great thing about design thinking is its accessibility! Why? Define, Ideate) Select 1-2 activities to support each step (15 min - 3 hr) End with a recap and next steps (30 min) You could develop an exercise in which participants look for evidence to support their statement, and evidence against it, thus coming to the conclusion that not everyone likes chocolate. This gives our workshop participants an understanding of why it is so important to work in an empathetic manner throughout our journey. Throughout your design career, you might find yourself running Design Thinking workshops for clientsgoing into different organizations and showing them how they can apply Design Thinking to their own business challenges. By the end of this session, you and your team need to have settled on one solution. As Mary Poppins put it so well, In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. Starting with these simple examples of different cakes is a great way to achieve this. Use some of the most effective tools and techniques to design your concepts. Lets go! 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. Since its debut in 1969 when Simon Herbert introduced the model in the Science of the Artificial, Design Thinking has revolutionized business models, education systems, processes of innovation, product and service design and human mindsets. In this workshop, well ask the group to approach the problem of baking a cake. Presentation (5 minutes): What is ideation? To review a set of ground rules and select the most important ones . After 5 minutes, share results among the group. Workshop facilitation is an important skill for any designer, but it can be tricky to master. Design Thinking activities, such as empathy maps and user stories are a convenient way for organizing detailed user research. For example: A busy, middle-aged professional needs an easy way of meeting like-minded people in the local area. Building a highly effective team takes effort, consideration,, Have you heard of Design Thinking? 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