Design Thinking Worshops

A practical guide

Skills required‍

• Ability to speak on stage and be persuasive to and audience of non-design participants.‍
• Deep understanding of the subject matter.‍
• Improvise. (Nothing ever goes according to plan - there's always some unexpected issue)‍
• Ability to quickly troubleshoot technical issues.‍
• Anticipate the needs and empathise with your audience. ‍
• Know when to make and enforce rules (e.g. no cellphones)‍
• Detachment from the task at hand.Your job as facilitator is to ensure your participants complete the workshop successfully. Even if you are a stakeholder in a problem which affects your work, you should not influence the outcomes of the workshop. ‍
• Understand your audience’s attention span, patience, intellectual discomfort tolerance, understanding of the subject matter.
• Understand the background of the audience so as to adapt your presentation to their information starting-points.
• Adapt vocabulary to that of your audience’s professional background. (e.g. if you are talking to bankers, saying ‘development’ will mean something very different than if they were designers)
• Assume the audience has a very narrow view of what Design is, and that they don’t see themselves as ‘artists’ and therefore not at all creative people.

Physical prep.

1 Week prior:
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‍Send out an agenda including:A breakdown of the start and end timesAt least a short description of each section of the day.Demarcated times for breaks. If you are dealing with executives or sales people, try make it a shorter day with ‘digital breaks’ where they can check messages on phones/laptops. Venue name and directions if appropriate
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Ensure that you have your presentation doc backed up on at least 1 other device.
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Try dry-running key parts of your workshop with colleagues and friends
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Call the venue and ensure that the required setup will be available.Ask for a “Banquet” or “Cabaret” layout wherein the audience is divided into tables of no less than 4 and no more than 10 (depends on your audience size)

Gather any physical resources required for your practical exercises.

Typically with practical exercises where the participants will be creating a paper prototype, you will need: (Stationary (below is intended for 40 participants)

• Worksheets (e.g. the D School’s Gift Giving Experience worksheets)
• 1 X ream of A4 paper
• 50 X Black Pens
• 10 X packs of 1cm round dot stickers 10 packs of Post-its / Super-stickies (Multicoloured)
• 40 x Sharpie markers
• 5 x aluminium foil
• 5 x pack of popsicle sticks
• 5 x masking tape
• 5 x Sellotape
• 5 X Scissors (capable of cutting cardboard & Paper
• 5 X Pritt

‍Pointer.
If you have a pointer, pack it. You could probably rent one from the conference centre / Hotel but they charge a lot for small rentals like this. Make sure it has batteries / is charged. If you can’t get a pointer, both Keynote and Powerpoint have tablet/smartphone remote apps you can use, but this requires that the internet in the venue is reliable. Test beforehand. The Logitech R800 (ZAR 600.00) is the most ubiquitous model. Most pointers work on Mac and Windows on both Powerpoint and Keynote.
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On the day
‍If this is hosted at a conference centre or hotel, you’ll mostly be talking to the AV technician who will be responsible for setting up the microphone, projector, screen, speakers, cabling and lighting. Arrive at least half an hour before your agenda begins in order to setup and take stock of the space you’ll be using. You will likely be standing for the majority of a 6-9 hour session. Be prepared for that. Do not show your presentation on a device you have not tested before. If you have to, ensure all fonts are sent with the presentation.
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Goals
You’re not going to teach your audience everything they need to know in the first day of even the first week so your goals should be:   To grow their confidence in their own creative problem solving abilitiesTo inspire them to take action themselves - after the fact - to seek out further information on the subject, and seek out opportunities to practice these new skills. to convince them of the business value of design thinking using both logical and statistical evidence.

Create a sense of continuity
‍Give your audience ‘next steps’ - some small, easy action they should take when they go out into the real-world.Follow up with comms including providing the presentation and links to follow-on resources e.g. a list of links to advanced online resources Ask for feedback.