Creativity Workshop Activities

If you like playing Charades (Guess the word) in a live setting, there is no reason to hold you back playing it online with your team. Here is a handy Mural board and detailed instruction of how to play Charades with your team, using the words and expressions YOU come up with.

words are passed like gifts in the group

Any creative endeavour can generate a certain amount of anxiety. The first step is always the hardest… has anyone not heard that before?

In his book ‘Being Creative’, Michael Avatar suggests that we draw inspiration from the Zen Buddhist idea of the 'beginner's mind' - where everything is beginning. In a beginner's mind there is possibility, openness, curiosity: all qualities that are useful for an exploration of creativity. This activity is a short, grounding ideation and exploration that taps into the beginner's mind.

This creative method invites participants to bring a possible future to life by designing or imagining a tangible object from that world. In the same way that we have historical artefacts from the past, this exercise is all about creating a tangible “artefact from the future.” It’s a way to make abstract scenarios feel real, prompting empathy, engagement, and grounded conversation.

Artefacts from the future can be run in a 2D or 3D approach.

When adopting the 3D approach, this method shifts participants into a making mindset. This engages their analytical thinking as well as intuition, improvisation, and embodied creativity. This helps surface insights that might not emerge through discussion or writing alone.

Canvas for Us (A Silent Reflective Gallery Walk)

If curiosity and empathy can be a driver of creativity, there is no reason why they need be restricted to the observation of others. A range of technologies increasingly allow us to track, monitor and in doing so discover things about our own behaviours. Much of creativity is centred on making visible the invisible and for this reason spending time experimenting tools which allow us to do this may help us reflect on the potential for digital tools to be part of our creative toolbox.

Become immersed in your user's life. Break out of your designer bubble and immerse yourself in the environment you're working to create solutions that feel both fresh and relevant.

Set participants up to create their own mini-deck of cards and bring home insights, key concepts and metaphors to remind them of the workshop.

One idea enters the circle. The group builds it together, one sentence at a time. Every statement begins with "Yes, and..."

Want to experience a fun, ever-change game? Bring a round of Calvinball to your next meeting - with a football, deckchairs, rackets, boomerangs, a deck of cards, a hula hoop, pens and paper (anything!) . . . and anyone can change the rules at any time.

Group game with two random words together as a new invention the group creates one yes, and statement at at time.