Where there is ambiguity, there is potential for a workshop. Stakeholder engagement and prioritisation is key to a more equitable process for accessible experiences. Here’s where probes, prototypes, and other making methods can support participants’ abilities to analyse and envision new futures or anticipate what might happen. How might the act of making be a mechanism for coding and interpreting one’s own data? What might participant co-analysis achieve? How can workshop participants better anticipate, and design for, nascent needs that might emerge within future experiences?
Below are some co-design workshops held among communities and key stakeholders.
Internal Stakeholder Workshops
JB Hi-Fi Australia, 2023-current
Below are a few examples of discovery and requirement gathering for implementation across various projects captured in Miro. The workshops employed were part of leading complex initiatives to deliver end-to-end improvements for the business.
As outcomes, the workshops intended to define problems, orchestrate delivery across teams, manage ambiguity, and demonstrate measurable customer outcomes within the initiatives.
Identified opportunities, gaps, the ideal experience, and competitor examples for omni-channel personalisation, 2023.
Gathered requirements to improve a the customer’s purchase journey across channels, 2023.
Captured customer and staff insights across the whitegoods customer journey to help prioritise business initiatives, 2022.
Re-Imagining Data in Creative Practice
Melbourne Design Week workshop, 2019
Participants creating a speculative data prototype, 2019.
Whether loved, hated, leveraged or misunderstood; some form of data is essential to design that seeks to create change in the real world. From searchable statistics to idiosyncratic insights, diverse types of data both inform and are informed by design praxis. In this workshop, participants walked through how design data has been used to navigate interdisciplinary spaces, illuminate complex problems, and propose disruptive ideas.
Participants were invited to reflect, articulate, and analyse the different types of data in their own practice, and examine the design decisions and activities that make that data known. Learning from and with each other, this event created a space for any creative practitioner to interrogate and transform their preconceptions about what data might look like, feel like, and ways it might deepen and inform our own practices.
Download the presentation here.
Brick + Beam Detroit
IDEO + Knight Foundation Civic Design Fellowship, 2015
Participant collecting materials for workshopping event, 2015.
Brick + Beam Detroit aims to make it easier for current and prospective people to rehab their buildings across the city and inclusively across skill levels.
Support for building rehab in Detroit is a core element of the project, providing emotional and physical support for users who need help to get (or keep!) going. The project also demonstrates that rehabilitation/preservation is a force for dealing with vacant/abandoned properties in the city of Detroit.
The audience for the project was simple: any existing and prospective residents/property owners across Detroit as well as subcontractors, developers, and people interested in Detroit’s amazing architecture – all skill levels, all building types.
Local community members gathered for the kick off Brick + Beam event, 2015.
Coalescing in a kick-off workshop event, feedback and ideation from the community was collected on the production of supportive materials, including: Classes: on-Site in buildings currently being rehabbed; peer-to-peer; and expert-led, financial incentives (federal, state, local/private, public), list of salvage warehouses/supply stores, list of trades people who work on older houses, and profiles of people and the aspects of their rehab stories that will be useful to others.
This is Water
How can design mitigate the effects of chronic stress among high school students?
The Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management (UASEM), NYC, 2015
A participant’s stress map across what it is Doing, Saying, Feeling, and Thinking, 2015.
This Is Water, examined chronic stress on high school students and what design can do to help mitigate the psychological and physiological effects of that stress. Reid Henkel and I partnered with The Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management, to create a ten week program that uses Reflective Making (form-giving & storytelling) techniques to increase students’ awareness about the effects of their stress (what it does, says, feels, and thinks) on both themselves and others in their lives.
By engaging students in conversations with their stress they will be better equipped to thrive in this world because if you can change the way you see your stress you can change the stress you see.
A participant’s stress form of what it looks like, made through Reflective Making, 2015.
A participant’s Stress Map, of where their stress is situated, what it affects, and is affected by, 2015.
A participant’s “Doing, Saying, Feeling, Thinking” questionnaire of their’s and other’s stress across the program’s weeks, 2015.