Library of facilitation techniques

Design Workshop Activities

Service Design and Design Thinking activities to help your group innovate and develop new solutions and services.
59 results
Jonathan Courtney (AJ&Smart Berlin)

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ)

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

  • Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
  • Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
  • Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
  • Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
  • Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
  • In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
AJ&Smart has worked with some of the most innovative, productive companies in the world. What sets their teams apart from others is not better tools, bigger talent or more beautiful offices. The secret sauce to becoming a more productive, more creative and happier team is simple:
Replace all open discussion or brainstorming with a structured process that leads to more ideas, clearer decisions and better outcomes.


When a good process provides guardrails and a clear path to follow, it becomes easier to come up with ideas, make decisions and solve problems.


This is why AJ&Smart created Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ). It’s a simple and short, but powerful group exercise that can be run either in-person, in the same room, or remotely with distributed teams.
6
Digital Society School

MoSCoW

MoSCoW is a method that allows the team to prioritize the different features that they will work on. Features are then categorized into “Must have”, “Should have”, “Could have”, or “Would like but won‘t get”.

To be used at the beginning of a timeslot (for example during Sprint planning) and when planning is needed.

Digital Society School

Empathy map

An empathy map is a tool to help a design team to empathize with the people they are designing for. You can make an empathy map for a group of people or for a persona.

To be used after doing personas when more insights are needed.

1
Hyper Island

Design Sprint for Any Team

Inspired by Google’s design sprint process, this workshop provides a structure that teams can use to rapidly prototype and test new ideas. Use this workshop to rapidly ideate, prototype and try out a new concept and practice working creatively and quickly with your team.

Digital Society School

Backcasting

Backcasting is a method for planning the actions necessary to reach desired future goals. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating.

To be used when a future goal (even if it is vague) has been identified.

1
Hyper Island

90-Minute Prototypes

90-Minute Prototypes is a short and sweet prototyping workshop that challenges teams to build basic clickable app prototypes within 90 minutes. It’s easy to plan and run and demonstrates how rapidly an insight can be turned into a test-ready prototype. Use it to inspire your team to embrace a prototyping mindset.

Gamestorming methods

Draw toast

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.

This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

Digital Society School

Dot voting

Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.

To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.

1