Design workshop

Include creatives from your team, stakeholders engaged in the process, and target audience members who can act as a sounding board for the ideas. This is the time to apply your expertise because stakeholders and target audience members will likely lead the design down a traditional training route.

Send the agenda in advance and create slides to keep you on track. It’s important to be organised and lead the workshop with authority. Poorly prepared design workshops are at risk of being derailed by powerful stakeholders or target audience members with strong opinions or biases.

Start by briefly revisiting the problem statement and outlining the journey so far.

Once everyone’s on board, it’s time to run some ideation exercises. No two design workshops are ever the same. You could run this as a hackathon, where the aim is to prototype something as quickly as possible, or you could use it as an opportunity to co-design an agenda together. (This is particularly useful if your solution is an event.)

However you do this, your workshop should aspire to achieve the following:

a) Agreement on the problem statement. This may have changed through discovery.
b) Consensus on what you’re developing. For example, are you designing a livestream induction event, a social game, or a website? The approach will be different for each.
c) A plan for who will do what and when. If your solution uses video, who will script, shoot, and edit these? If you’re using facilitators to deliver your solution, what support do they need to deliver it to a world-class standard?
d) The vibe. What do you imagine your solution will ‘feel’ like? Is it a serious session challenging skills? Is it a playful set of games, or an emotive documentary?

Ideally, record the workshop; you even ask an AI to summarise it. If that’s not possible, spend time typing up all the notes and take pictures or screenshots of the output.

It’s now time to combine all of the prioritised ideas into one feasible solution. This should be visible on a slide that shows the end-to-end solution as workstreams. After this point, you’ll start building and testing, so it’s best to get agreement from all the stakeholders in writing before proceeding to the next stage.