The ultimate guide to running a design thinking workshop
Table Of Content
For those of you running a remote Design Thinking workshop, you’ll have a slightly different set of challenges to those hosting the in-person variant. To give you a helping hand, we’ve put together a handy list of tools and best practices you can follow to make sure you and your workshop group are well prepared for your remote workshop session. A Design Thinking workshop is a collaborative session that is focused on the five phases of Design Thinking. It’s a process that is designed to encourage creative problem solving and innovation from each member of the group in order to address business challenges. This is also a good time to ask your design team what they learned from the design thinking workshop.
Scope out the challenge and set objectives
Trinity Students Combine Tech Skills with Design Thinking in 3D Printing Workshop - Trinity College
Trinity Students Combine Tech Skills with Design Thinking in 3D Printing Workshop.
Posted: Thu, 07 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork. This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started. Design thinking gives teams a new way to approach their projects and overcome some of those well-known challenges.
Design Thinking for Innovation
Gamification can also be used in prototyping and testing activities. Participants can be encouraged to experiment with different solutions. This encourages them to take risks, learn from failures, and iterate rapidly. Time boxing is a simple yet powerful concept used in design thinking workshops to manage time effectively. These approaches encourage the formation of cross-functional teams in a design thinking workshop.
useful online tools for workshop planning and meeting facilitation
The team produces inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas. The team aims to understand the problem, typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to design thinking because it allows designers to set aside your assumptions about the world and gain insight into users and their needs. At the beginning of the design thinking process, teams should not get too caught up in the technical implementation. If teams begin with technical constraints, they might restrict innovation.
Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
A clear purpose is the guiding light in the design of a workshop. This clarity helps in aligning every element of your workshop with your overarching goals, ensuring that your workshop content and activities are focused and effective. A clear purpose guides the design process, ensuring that the experience of the workshop aligns with your objectives. That means that design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers, and business leaders.
About This Guide
Once you identify the problem and understand it from the user's perspective, you can establish some guardrails and clearly define the next steps. As your workshop draws to a close, you’ll round things off with a quick debrief. It’s essentially anything that makes your idea tangible and allows it to be tested in some way. For our elementary school example, our workshop objective would be to come up with an effective solution for delivering lessons online. However, we’ve taken the all-important step of establishing a clear purpose for the workshop; we’ll narrow the challenge down later on as part of the workshop itself. Just because your team is scattered all over the globe or you’ve got people working from home, it doesn’t mean you have to put those all-important business challenges on hold.
Design Thinking and Innovation FAQs
Innovation workshop using design thinking framework and involving stakeholders to co-create ideas for management ... - Nature.com
Innovation workshop using design thinking framework and involving stakeholders to co-create ideas for management ....
Posted: Sat, 04 Nov 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
For this step, we’d suggest refraining from open discussion when trying to decide on which ideas to go forward with. This method of decision-making tends to favor the eloquent extroverted speakers and neglect more reserved people. For the ideation phase to be the most effective your team will have to feel safe to challenge the norm and wide-spread assumptions. So lay judgment by side, there is no space for “that’s the way it’s always been done” at this stage.
Why Time Boxing Works
The earlier stages of the process — Empathize, Define, and Ideate — are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions. Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one — you’ll build on that later.
Let’s say you have facilitated a workshop, you’re looking to prepare your first workshop, or want to learn more about UX in general, but you still have some doubts or questions. It really helps the flow of the workshop and will also put less stress on the participants. For example, I’m an introverted UX designer, and even though I really enjoy facilitating a workshop, it is something that costs me a lot of energy. If you do an in-person workshop, you need to have a good ‘stage presence,’ too. That ‘crazy eight’ exercise I mentioned earlier is something you can do even quicker if you work online because of tools like Miro and FigJam. Create a presentation where you show the ideas and your suggested next steps for these ideas.
The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on user-centric research. You want to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize with your users. You may also want to immerse yourself in your users’ physical environment to gain a deeper, personal understanding of the issues involved—as well as their experiences and motivations. Empathy is crucial to problem solving and a human-centered design process as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs. Different impacts are seen through different organizations, depending on where they start and what their goals are for the program.
As creative and exciting as our rapid-fire exercises are, they can leave our group with too many options, feeling swamped with potential solutions. 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 Persona’s needs. In pairs, they can continue to fill in any blanks with their partner when creating Personas in order to get a more rounded view of their end-user. In this article, I’m going to share how I’ve facilitated and organized many design thinking workshops throughout my UX career. We’ll discuss how to prepare for the workshop, how to conduct one, and what to expect as the next steps once you’ve completed your design thinking workshop.
Let’s consider the benefits of a Design Thinking workshop in more detail. To ensure your remote Design Thinking workshop runs as smoothly as possible, it’s important to keep in mind the following best practices. To ensure maximum creativity, you’ll be going back to basics for your Design Thinking workshop. You’ll want to stock up on white copy paper, colored paper, pencils, marker pens, Post-It notes of different colors, sticky tape, and whiteboards. Spot opportunities and challenges for increasing the impact of design systems and DesignOps in enterprises.
Before we move into our second exercise, it’s often useful to discuss and explain who our Stakeholders are. We have already mentioned that the people eating the cake would be called our end users. When considering the term “Stakeholder” this could mean anyone who is involved in the cake-making or consuming process. Hopefully, this guide and the linked resources will help you plan and run your own successful workshop. If you need further assistance or want to discuss the implementation of design thinking in your organization, reach out to us at Windmill Smart Solutions.
In this section, we’ll show you how to devise an effective workshop agenda. We’ve included recommended time allocations for each item, giving you a total workshop duration of four hours (including three 15-minute breaks, and some buffer time). At this stage, you may be wondering how many participants to invite.
Researching as much as you can before the workshop will help you better identify knowledge gaps that you need to close. It helps also to build your credibility quickly, which essential to effective coordination of the group. Understanding the design challenge is one of the most important steps of any workshop. This step is important for the facilitator and every participant. Methods like "dot voting" or "idea prioritisation matrix" enable participants to evaluate and prioritise concepts collectively.
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