Design Workshop Activities

An activity to identify the direction in which your work should be moving.

Empathy in action is a way to help people empathize with, and understand a specific situation that is foreign to them.

To be used when you have collected enough data to understand a problem and need to let people unfamiliar with the problem empathize with it.

Build on your ideas by looking at them from someone else's perspective. What would your favorite actor think of your concept? Would your president or prime minister endorse it? What if you were to switch hats with another organization? How would they change or build on your idea?

Following a similar structure of the Persona method, give your design personality by creating a design persona. This can be through visual design, copy, and interactions.

To be used when it is time to focus on product experience.

Find new opportunities by testing the limit of what's possible? Sometimes getting unstuck means zooming out and then dreaming big. Here's your opportunity to get fantastical. Don't worry about viability or resources, worry about saving the world.

The object of this game is to examine an issue from another perspective and find significance in the issue.

‘Who, What, Where, When, Why and How’ is a method used to obtain a thorough understanding of a problem.

Fishbone diagrams show the causes of a specific event.

Learn through careful observation.

Observation and intuition are critical design tools. This exercise helps you leverage both. Find clues about the context you're designing for that may be hidden in plain sight.

Build empathy by retelling someone's story.

A brainstorming and prioritizing method that places emphasis on the most important ideas and actions.

Understand your users day-to-day. To better design for people, try shadowing them for a day. By observing someone in their own context, you'll notice details about their life - the way they engage with people, pr their routine - that you'd otherwise never see.