I just came out of this session on collaborative design with users.
I have to confess, at first I didn’t get it. Everyone was given some supplies and about a sentence of instruction, and that was it. I thought there was no way that the people in the audience, the users, would know what to do.
To my surprise, after a couple of low-key minutes, people started sorting through the supplies and having more animated conversations. Twenty minutes later, a room full of people who didn’t know each other had generated 13 incredibly complex and well thought out possible approaches to the challenge topic of user experience education in 2012.
The key, I think, is the supplies that you give people to start them off. Sanders’s supply kits were great, full of all kinds of keywords and pictures and shapes of all colors and sizes, plus some scissors, some glue sticks, and some sharpies.
By giving participants material that’s ambiguous enough to be interpreted differently by different people but directed enough to generate specific ideas on the question at hand, you bypass the whole blank page, blank mind problem.
This seems like an incredibly useful tool for coming up with ideas in an organization where stakeholders don’t think of themselves as creative or aren’t used to generative design thinking. Awesome.
