RESEARCH METHOD

28 Design Workshops

Design workshops are a form of participatory design consolidating creative co-design methods into organized sessions for several participants to work with design team members.

Design workshops are efficient, compelling, fun ways to gain the creative trust and input of stakeholders through activity-based research. Although they can be labor intensive to organize and run, design workshops are worthwhile for their strength in collecting a wealth of insight from participants, and to secure buy-in from team members and clients. Workshops can also be efficient for participants, as they are often brought to the workplace or held in locations convenient to all.

In design exploration, workshops can consist of projective techniques such as collage, mapping, or diagramming exercises, targeted at gaining an understanding of the user’s world and establishing design implications. Design workshops are most common in generative research, in participatory sessions focused on co-design exercises such as flexible modeling, contributing to ideation, and verifying design team direction. In evaluative sessions, participants are brought together to collectively review concepts, offer feedback, and contribute insights for design iteration and refinement.

Generally design workshops will entail several activities, planned and orchestrated by design team facilitators. For example, the workshop may begin with an overview of topics and presentation of the agenda, followed by group discussion of concerns, documented or drawn by team members. Individual ideas can be noted by participants on sticky notes, then shared and organized by the group in affinity diagrams. Collages, drawings, or other forms of creative expression can be completed by individuals or smaller teams and presented to everyone. The workshop may include hands-on training of simple design tools, enabling participants to create mock-ups, sketches, or storyboards, or role-play interactions in small teams to exemplify problem solving by design.

The critical features of design workshops are to plan the timing and logistics appropriately for the participants and design team members, gather the necessary materials for the activities planned, stay on track with the plan while remaining adaptable to changing circumstances and team dynamics, and document the session in progress and collect the work outcomes afterward. To successfully meet these goals, design workshops need a balance of design team facilitators relative to the number of participants, with clearly defined roles.

Design workshops are increasingly used to train interested audiences in the methods and processes of design and design thinking. This is currently sought after in corporate training and executive education, where a combination of presentation and hands-on design activities expose participants from business and other roles to the common methods of design research, ideation, thinking, and processes.

Design workshops engage participants, often non-designers, in intense creative activity usually centered on assigned problems. Here a three-day workshop on design thinking for business executives is framed by field research and visualization techniques, for the design of new retail and information services.