Guide: Designing a Design Thinking Workshop

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Designing a Co-creative Workshop 🔖

Drawing on my experience in user research and innovation, I have facilitated numerous workshops where participants collaborate to build empathy with users, identify key challenges, brainstorm ideas, and prioritize solutions. This guide outlines my approach.

Steps to Conduct a Workshop

The design and execution of a collaborative session can vary greatly depending on the context. In this post, I’ll be sharing my general framework for designing a co-creative workshop, which you can tailor to fit the unique goals and needs of your project. Before diving into planning, it’s important to define your team’s objectives and consider the right participants. Who should be invited—stakeholders, users, or a combination of both?

🧶 The general steps

1. 1. 1. Topic Sensitization – This can be done before the workshop. You can email participants in advance to introduce the workshop topic. It can take various forms, such as a short survey or engaging visuals.
      2. Icebreaker – This step is crucial, as participants will be collaborating through a series of activities.
      3. Building Empathy – Activities like understanding personas, empathy mapping, and journey mapping help participants connect with user needs. If the users themselves are participating, the persona exercise is not necessary.
      4. Idea Generation – Techniques like brainstorming and 6-3-5 brainwriting can be helpful. Remember, idea generation is about quantity over quality—the more ideas, the better. They don’t need to be fancy.
      5. Prioritization – Once you have ideas, it’s crucial to prioritize them. Dot voting, the KANO model, or an impact-feasibility matrix can help identify which ideas to focus on.
      6. Identifying Opportunities – This stage involves creating action items using methods like How Might We questions and opportunity statements. The goal is to prompt clear actions so designers can start crafting solutions.
      7. Prototyping – Prototypes can be created during the session. Anyone can create them.
      8. Post-Workshop Survey – You can ask participants if they’re interested in joining future sessions and gather feedback.

🎯 Real-World Example

Let’s say we are conducting a co-creative workshop with stakeholders to define the needs of potential end users. The stakeholders invited include our colleagues from diverse teams and backgrounds, such as product, marketing, operations, and more.

1. Topic Sensitization

Pre-Workshop Survey

We started by emailing participants, asking them to fill out a pre-workshop survey. This allowed us to gather insights into their needs and challenges about the product, which influenced the design of the workshop. Furthermore, the survey encouraged participants to reflect on their experiences beforehand, leading to more active engagement during the session.

2. Ice-breakers

Ice-breakers are activities or exercises designed to help participants get to know each other, feel more comfortable, and establish a positive and open atmosphere at the beginning of a workshop. These activities are especially important in collaborative settings, as they break down initial barriers, encourage communication, and build trust among participants.

3. Introduction

We included the introduction in the slides to share the results of a pre-workshop survey we previously conducted. This survey was aimed at raising participants’ interest and understanding their expectations for the workshop.

4. Empathy Mapping

This part of the session included ‘Understanding Persona’ to encourage stakeholders to empathize with users’ experiences. Building on this, we introduced a collaborative exercise called ‘Empathy Mapping’. This activity involved creating a visual representation of a user’s experiences, pain points, gains, wants, and behaviors within the context of the service we are designing, helping participants develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs.

4-1. Understanding Personas

✅ Introduction

✅ Activity

4-2. Empathy Mapping

✅ Introduction

✅ Activity

5. Prioritization

To prioritize the findings from previous activities, various prioritization techniques can be used. The choice of method depends on the specific goals and context. In our case, we used the KANO Model, a popular framework that helps categorize ideas based on how they impact user satisfaction.

✅ Introduction

✅ Activity

6. How Might We?

The ‘How Might We?’ technique is commonly used to transform problems into opportunities for creative solutions. In our workshop, participants were encouraged to define their own ‘How Might We?’ questions, allowing them to frame challenges in a way that sparks innovation and empowers them to carry these perspectives into their work.

✅ Introduction

✅ Activity

7. Measuring Impact

Post-Workshop Survey

Following the workshop, we conducted a post-workshop survey to gather participant feedback on their experience during the sessions. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with 91% expressing a strong interest in participating in future sessions.