11 imaginative, fun, and collaborative Figma activities to do with your team
By: Sneh Singh
Tags: Collaboration, UX Design, Figma, Work Culture, Figmatips

We at Zeta design team take learning and growing very passionately. The team diligently dedicates an hour every Wednesday to our ‘Wednesday Session’ to keep learning and growing consistently.

In the Wednesday session, the Zeta design team comes together to learn about a design topic that one of the team members masters in, keeping up with the latest design trends and encouraging us to be up-to-date with our common interests. And, the sessions are organised by Rohit Raj.

Apart from that, the Wednesday sessions also put knowledge sharing into real practice with a hands-on activity at the end of each session. The activities help us implement the learning of the session.

In the pandemic, work from home became the new norm, where everyone worked in their silos, and teamwork became complicated and burdensome. As the Zeta design team's need of the hour was more collaboration, we moved from Sketch to Figma, a browser-based design tool. Once all our designs moved to Figma, it was organic to conduct the Wednesday session activities, with the help of Figma.

Illustration by Kopai Banerjee

So here is a list of the activities we conducted, and some fun things we did on Figma. Read on, and you’ll discover some exercises to do within your team too.

1. Do-it-together puzzle

The magic of Figma lies in its collaborative capabilities. It is like Photoshop meets Google docs, where different team members can come together to move up designs forward and faster. To highlight the benefits of working on Figma, Preethi Shreeya, organised a ‘Do-it-together puzzle’ where the Zeta design team was divided into four groups. And we had to solve a fun jigsaw puzzle in a limited amount of time.

Activity conducted by Preethi Shreeya

2. Woods

There was a clear feeling of disconnect in the early days of the pandemic in our team; therefore, Lakshmanan Palani, thought to warm up the Wednesday session with a fun workshop. Taking inspiration from Brex Virtual Team Offsite on Figma, Lakshmanan conducted a fun spin-off called ‘Virtual House Party’. In this Virtual House Party, the design team was divided into Team A and Team B.

Team B calls out an animal, and Team A has 30 seconds to doodle them using the pen tool and vice versa. At the end of the activity, each team goes through other teams' doodles and puts a star on any doodle they like.

Activity conducted by Lakshmanan Palani

3. Codenames

The two teams compete by each having a “spymaster” give one-word clues that can point to multiple words on the board. The other team members attempt to guess their team’s words while avoiding the other team's terms.

A game conducted by Lakshmanan Palani

4. Tradings cards

We all had to design and fill out our trading cards. In the card, we had to fill out our superpower, weakness, what fatigues us in design, the best time of day to be productive, what we are good at and later we could get them printed.

A preview of the trading cards

5. Practising Mindfulness in Design

To design products with an aspect of mindfulness, Saksham Sinha helped us look at the right questions and develop an active observation of how our designs could be mindful. To propel mindfulness in our design, Saksham made us do a simple yet very mindful activity that required us to be aware of our thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them. In this activity, Saksham gave everyone an artboard labelled with their names written, and we had to pen down the ‘purpose of our lives’.

A sneak peek of some of our team members’ purpose of life.

6. Thirty Circles Exercise

To usher the creative forces in the team, Nupur vats conducted Thirty Circles exercise.

Step 1: Each team member was given 30 Circles in a Figma frame.

Step 2: We had to turn as many circles as possible into recognisable objects in fifteen minutes (think clock faces, billiard balls, etc.).

Step 3: Compare results. Look for the quantity or fluency of ideas.

A snapshot of the 30 circles exercise.

7. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

Creativity is a combination of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation, Nupur vats conducted Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking to unravel the ingenious brains of our team

We were given four incomplete figures in this activity, and we were asked to sketch some novel objects or figure out those unfinished figures. This activity made us realise how we all had a different perspective on the same thing and how everyone’s creativity differs.

Nupur vats conducted the activity.

8. Building Figma Plugin

Figma community builds plugins to extend its capabilities. Anyone can create a plugin for themselves.

Manik Chugh conducted the activity.

Manik Chugh taught us how to create Figma Plugins. For the workshop, Manik divided the team into five groups and asked us to break down the process for creating a piechart in Figma through user inputs and categorise the code for a Figma plugin to understand how can we build a plugin on Figma.

A quick look into how we categorised the code for the pie chart

9. The 5 Squares

While conducting a session on system thinking, Mustafa Quilon held an activity where a group of five team members were given different pieces. Each team member had to form one square consisting of three pieces. We could exchange the piece in our team in the exchange box. One of the main rules of the activity was that we could not reuse a piece.

This is how we arranged the 5 squares.

10. Animal

The animal was an activity conducted by Ramakrishna Venkatesan, where a team of two people were given odd shapes and had to reassemble them to form animals and birds. The task was time-bound, and the most difficult part was to find which animal or bird it was.

The animal puzzle organised by Ramakrishna.

11. Illustration

The Pen Tool designs paths and shapes which can be manipulated to create complex selections, masks, and objects. So in a session with Rahul Menon, where he taught us how to use the pen efficiently, he gave us a blank canvas to draw a cow, dog, astronaut, or cat.