UX Australia 2011

Half-day workshop. Wednesday 24 August 2011. Morning. 

Description

Meetings are an ever-present part of modern business. They’re the place where teams come together to discuss important issues and make far-reaching decisions. However, with so many people in the room, we often find it difficult to take action or reach consensus. So the result of one meeting is often to schedule another. This can lead to the formation of a ‘meeting culture’ which is hard to break.

Love them or loath them, meetings are here to stay. So we need to get better at managing meetings and turn them from a productivity sink to a productivity booster. Enter the creative workshop.

At Clearleft we’ve gained a reputation for our active, collaborative and fun workshops. So we regularly have attendees tell us “this was the best, most productive workshop we’ve ever attended”. We’ve even won projects off the back of our workshop skills alone. To achieve this we use a number of activities (sometimes called design games) to structure our sessions. Using these techniques we can make sure that everybody feels like they have participated and come away feeling they have achieved the meeting’s goals.

In this workshop we will teach you everything you need in order to super charge your workshops. This will include:

• How to set up and plan the perfect workshop
• The real value of design games and other co-design activities
• How to run design games like ‘design the box’, ‘prune the tree’ and ‘what not to do’
• Facilitation techniques from the masters

By re-positioning yourself as a ‘design facilitator’ rather than a ‘design executer’, we will show you how to raise your profile, increase your influence and have a greater affect on product strategy. As such this is a must-do workshop for any and all user experience practitioners wanting to take their careers to the next level.

Workshop structure

The following activities will be practiced during the workshop:

• An introduction to creative workshops
• Planning, running and moderating creative workshops
• Core presentation techniques
• Using the ‘Design the box’ game as a warm up exercise
• A walk through various design games and activities
• Pick a game to play with your group

Outcomes

Participants will learn how to plan and moderate stakeholder workshops. They will be taught how to run a variety of different ‘design games’ in order to facilitate specific types of outcomes. These include:

• Proposition development (‘design the box’, ‘what not to do’)
• Collaborative design (‘design consequences’, ‘6-up to 1-up’)
• Group consensus making (‘divide the dollar’, ‘prune the tree’, ‘KJ Sort’)

Target audience

This workshop doesn’t require any prior knowledge and can be attended by anybody involved in shaping the design of digital products.

The ideal audience is mid to senior level user experience designers, plus product managers, creative directors and even members of the development team.

Materials provided

A set of rules explaining how each activity works and when and where it should be used.