Aim
In the ideation workshop creative people from LCC and Plan International UK worked together to get a large number of ideas. Based on those ideas, quality service concepts could be selected to be developed.
Keywords: Ideation Workshop, Participatory Design
Time & Location: 05/2017-07/2017, London
HOW DID IT HAPPEN
PREPARATION
After a call for workshop, 18 participants came to the ideation workshop, they all come from di erent backgrounds. For the students, they came from majors such as graphic design, interactive design, photography etc. All the students and sta from Plan International UK collaborated here.
The ideation workshop is divided into five parts, warming up, empathy preparation, brie ng, brainstorming and story developing.
Phase 1. Warming up
Warming up is to wake up participants physically and mentally to ensure every participant could be productive.
We started with body warm-ups designed for all the participants to feel relaxed and active to join the workshop. Because most of the participants did not know each other, a group warm-up helps them to know the team members better. After this, an identity game was set for the team members to introduce their strengths and skills to the team members. After the two parts, participants were ready to start the workshop.
Phase 2. Empathy preparation
Empathy preparation uses storytelling to enable participants to image other’s lifestyle. It helps raise awareness of touchpoints of everyday life and design with empathy.
Some participants were not familiar with human-centred design, so this exercise helps to work with empathy, an important method in service design, which means being able to think oneself as others, and design for the users based on real understanding. After this, we ran a sense game: each group got a box of stu from one person. There were pictures, audios and objects of one person. Participants were asked to look at those materials, image the person’s life and tell this person’s story. The process asked team members think from daily physical touchpoints to the person’s lifestyle. The materials related to di erent human senses, and it involved people using their own senses to feel them, making participants more receptive and tuned into sense qualities for the ideation.
Phase 3. Briefing
Brie ng to let each team member understand the Plan UK project. Each team decided their group direction with the “how might we” method.
After rst stage’s research, we prepared a presentation, including background information, aim of the project, personas and insights, for the participants to get a good sense of the project.
After the brie ng, the problem area of this project were still open. Hence, an in-group de ning process was designed. Each group selected 3 keywords which they wrote down during the brie ng presentation. The 3 key words and “How might we” sentence structure were used together to build a sentence, which could work as design brief and describe the direction of each group, in addition to the project aim “Develop a new way of demonstrating the collective voice of our supporters”.
“How might we”
The four design briefs were:
“How might we use storytelling to bring light to everyday installations to campaign- ing communities.”
“How might we use digital to connect more people globally to Plan UK campaigns?”
“How might we design new ways of communication to build trust in Plan UK’s wor?.”
“How might we design a fresh way for people to voice and demonstrate their solidari- ty collectively?”
Since then, every group had their clear goal of what kind of ideas they were trying to come up with.
Phase 4. Brainstorming
Brainstorming lets participants, who come from di erent backgrounds with di erent thinking models, consider the design brief in various aspects, coming up with a large number of ideas in a short time.
Under the brainstorming principles, each group brainstormed with their own design brief and a speci c persona for the rst round.
Second round of brainstorming asked team members change to another table, so they were working with another table’s persona and “How might we”. This process ensured the ideas from di erent people were communicated for each brief. More than 102 ideas were collected at this activity.
Phase 5. Story developing
Selecting promising ideas by in-group voting and devel- oping the ideas to a full story with the service journey as a guide.
Each team was asked to vote their favourite ideas. Based on their select- ed ideas, each team was asked to develop them to 4 di erent stories. The storyline was based on the supporters’ service journey, which covers inform, engage, feedback and share. The four groups presented the stories with their own skills and di erent materials. A total 16 quality stories which covered four service stages were built at the end.
At the end of the ideation workshop, there are 4 “how might we” design briefs, around 102 initial ideas and 16 high quality stories.
