Work with Remote Teams

It’s not always practical to gather a group of people for a design workshop. Luckily, design studios and other collaboration-focused workshops work great for remote teams. Here are a few tips for facilitating a remote workshop. These tips apply to any of the activities discussed here as well as the activities described in Part III.

Use remote collaboration tools.

This is an absolute prerequisite. Find a combination of remote collaboration tools that allow your group to work together and share the fruits of your exploration. Depending on the specific activities in the workshop, you will need tools that allow screen sharing, collaborative document editing, collaborative drawing, brainstorming, group chat, and voice communication. Many tools are available on the web for each of these options.

Add time to the agenda.

Distributed groups need more time to complete collaborative design activities. Remote meetings always experience technical problems. Plan ahead and you won’t be surprised.

Create breakout opportunities.

Only one person can talk on the phone at a ftime. When only one person can speak at a time, group work becomes nearly impossible. Create a back channel for communication using group chat software. If group work is part of the workshop, decide which teleconference phone numbers they’ll use and set clear deadlines for when the large group should reconvene.

Provide a focal point.

It’s easy to get distracted in a remote meeting. Facilitators don’t have the ability to sketch notes on a whiteboard—only the people in the room with you will see it. Prepare presentation material that participants can use on their own or share your screen. Invite everyone to contribute to a shared document during group discussions to keep everyone engaged.

Make it face-to-face.

Nothing beats face-to-face interaction. When possible, use video conferencing software that allows participants to see one another for at least parts of the workshop.

Take it off line.

Workshops aren’t the only way to explore ideas. You can run many design activities in slow motion, over the course of several days. For example, a round-robin-like activity can be accomplished via email just as effectively as in person.

Here’s an example of what a remote architecture design studio looks like. Marie, our facilitator, arrived early, started her screen sharing software, and dialed into the meeting’s teleconference number. Once all participants were dialed in, Marie kicked off the meeting by presenting slides containing the workshop’s agenda and goals. Marie would usually write these things on a whiteboard, but she wanted all participants to be able to see them.

The team was doing a round-robin design activity. Marie instructed participants to sketch a view of the architecture and take a picture with their phone to share it. Each participant shared their sketch via a Slack private message. For the second round, participants annotated the picture they were assigned using drawing software, took a screen shot of it, and added the original and annotated images to a shared Box.com folder.

After some brief discussion about the sketches, Marie divided participants into groups. Each group used Google Hangouts and shared Box.com documents to create a presentation with their ideas for the architecture. At the requested time, everyone rejoined the workshop teleconference to share their presentations. During the critiques, Marie and other participants took notes together in a shared document. Instead of a rapid-fire 90-minute workshop, the design studio ended almost on time after a little more than two hours.