A day in a Design thinking workshop In Paris
Tags: Workshop, Design Thinking, Design, Paris, UX

Hello everyone! For this week I wanted to do article like a “day in my life” but design related! I had this great opportunity to do a 100% free Design thinking workshop thanks to meet up and atypie, so I will share with you this great experience and my learnings. So let’s go!

What is design thinking?

A Design Thinking workshop is a hands-on, activity-based session built around the Design Thinking process.

Most often, these are conducted in person, but you can certainly adapt and conduct a remote Design Thinking workshop. I prefer when it is in person, It was great to meet new people and have a workshop with a design thinking expert.

It can last two hours, two days, or even a full week-it all depending on the context and the goals at hand.

Based on the five phases of Design Thinking, a Design Thinking workshop focuses on:

Design thinking process ©winbids

-Empathy: Getting to grips with a real user problem and building empathy for the target users / customers.

- Ideation, innovation, and problem-solving: Generating as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.

-Prototyping and testing: Building low-fidelity prototypes of the ideas generated, ready for testing on real or representative users.

Design Thinking workshops are all about collaboration and problem-solving.

How about my workshop?

The workshop was Introduced by Atypie a design firm that provides design thinking workshops for public sector institutions. I had the opportunity to assist in one of these workshops for free by using the “Meetup” app. It was difficult to find the facilities but It was worth it! During this workshop, we had a theoric lesson, and after that, we had a real case or problem-solving.

The problem: recreational sport can be difficult to disable people, the goal is to make the collective recreational sport more inclusive.

How to make sport more inclusive for disable persons?

Introduction to design thinking & problem presentation

We had brief presentation on what design thinking is, the phases of design thinking, and its benefits. This presentation is useful even for designers who are already familiar with the design thinking philosophy because it brings everyone up to speed and ensures that you are all on the same page.

Oh my god, we learned a lot!

After that, we had a brief about the problem and how we will solve this problem using design thinking methodology: Understanding, research, and ideation. The goal wasn’t to create a real product but to imagine potential solutions for sports federations and clubs.

Understanding & research (divergance)

This is the first step in the design thinking process where you encourage the workshop participants to put themselves in the shoes of the user. This will help them to start generating ideas on what the user needs from the product.

You can use activities such as role-playing and creating an empathy map to help the participants understand the needs, wants, feelings, and language of the user. After these activities, give the participants a chance to share their findings and ask questions, if any.

For our case, we had a canvas to know exactly what we have to do and when. First, we had a divergence step to imagine, develop a hypothesis and have a refined problem statement. Then we work on our problem statement ideate and deliver a great prototype that will (we hope) help solve the problem.

The first step was understanding:

We had to do secondary research about inclusivity in recreational sport, we also interviewed a disabled person to know his motivations and pain points.

Set the scene! 😍

We also did a silence brainstorm about how enhance communication in the sport field for disable and non disable person. We create a lot of idea that we clusterd in an affiniy map. It give use good insight to know on what we will work on.

Affinity diagram

After the empathy exercise, participants are better placed to really narrow down on the problem that the user faces. Ask your team to create a problem statement that will guide the rest of the design thinking workshop.

Problem statement: The hearing impaired person needs a way to see all members of the team to practice a collective recreation sport knowing that it can be surrounding noises & distractions.

Our problem statement

Ideation: come up with ideas and possible solutions (convergence)

The next design thinking step is ideation where your team suggests possible solutions to the problem that they identified in step 6. Use techniques such as brainstorming to come up with a list of potential solutions.

Give the participants a chance to discuss their solutions and then come up with one refined solution.

For our ideation step, we did a brainstorm 6–3–5

6–3–5 Brainwriting (or 635 Method, Method 635) is a group-structured brainstorming technique aimed at aiding innovation processes by stimulating creativity .

In brief, it consists of 6 participants supervised by a moderator who is required to write down 3 ideas on a specific worksheet within 5 minutes; this is also the etymology of the methodology’s name. The outcome after 6 rounds, during which participants swap their worksheets passing them on to the team member sitting at their right, is 108 ideas generated in 30 minutes. The technique is applied in various sectors but mainly in business, marketing, design, and writing, as well as everyday real-life situations.

It was great to enhance other solutions and have feedback on our solutions! For example, I imagine an IoT glass, which provides a screen of all the field. But my cowers add that pieces of information on the user team need to be highlighted. Brainstorming 6–3–5 is great to have ideas in ideas!

Prototyping and testing

This is the final step in the design thinking process where participants will create low fidelity prototypes of their solution. Ask the users to create screens for each step of the user journey and then ask them to add functionality to their screens in the form of buttons.

For our workshop we start ideating on paper, (LOFI) and we quickly switch to a 3D prototype, it was so fun! And useful to test our prototype on the field (User can run with it? was is great, what needs to be improved?)