Introducing Design Thinking to a team of space designers at Cheil Germany.
In October 2019, I facilitated three sessions in which I introduced the Design Thinking Methodology to a team of 18 space designers that are currently working at Cheil MDLab.
Space designers are confronted every day with very complex challenges. They need to strongly understand brands, deal with space constraints and design user experiences that allow consumers to connect with products and services.
As a design strategist, my role is to introduce, explain and apply DT tools to our projects. Ideally, the methodology will help the team to address these complex challenges while slowly shaping teamwork culture and enhancing the communication between team members.
Our first try was a two-hour workshop in which we translated user stories into space brand experiences.
Warm-Up
To energize the team, I started with the classical Walk and Stop warm up. This helped me to introduce new dynamics to the team and keep them energized for the first part of the workshop.
Research
Tools: (Interview guideline, 3 whys, user interview)
We started to understand our challenge by writing down an interview guideline. The goal of this step was to seek stories. The research phase and the tools helped participants to build empathy with their users, understand their needs, and begin the problem exploration with a human-centered approach.
Synthesize
Tools: (Insight Statements and HMW)
We analyzed the results of the user interview and chose one interesting fact they have heard during the talk. This insight was translated into a question by using the How Might We statement.
We wrapped out this first part of the workshop by sharing with the group one story, one insight, and one HMW.
My favorite story was one from an ADIDAS lover. He told us that the first time he bought a pair of Adidas shoes was with the money of a street soccer match bet in India.
The question was: How might we enable teenagers to buy their first Adidas shoes by encouraging them to practice sports in our stores?
This step was very important to understand how to translate user insights into HMW questions that allow the group to imagine products, services, and experiences for the ideation session.
Ideation
Tools: (Brainstorm)
The goal of our ideation session was to generate a diverse set of concepts in response to the HMW questions. We did this ideation step by brainstorming in groups, writing down ideas in post its and clustering potential paths for the solution.
This step was extremely important for our space designers team. In their daily work, they jump too quickly into ideation sessions without having a clear understanding of the challenge or direction to filter their thoughts.
The introduction to How Might We questions, allowed the team to understand how to structure a brainstorming process without losing sight of the insight they gain during the research phase.
Prototyping, Test, and Iteration
Tools: (Rapid Lego Prototyping)
Rapid prototyping is something very far from the daily life of a space designer. Usually, they spend hours modeling in Rhino before they share their thoughts about a specific project.
For me as a facilitator was important to introduce this rapid prototyping mindset to help improve the workflow at MDLab. Instead of focusing on too many details we quickly built models with LEGO to communicate our ideas to the team.
Participants gathered feedback by collective discussion in less than 20 minutes and they were able to iterate their first tryouts without getting even close to their computers.
At the end of the workshop, we did a recap about the phases and the tools we used. As a facilitator, I was excited to see the team working together and trying new ways to collaborate.
Later, participants helped me to reflect on my role as a facilitator and the way I have structured the workshop:
What was your major take away from the workshop?
I liked the timed aspect of the workshop. It encouraged quick thinking and decision making.
What tools do you think are the most useful to immediately apply to our projects?
Putting the user as a number one priority and finding a good story about them that helps with building a successful design.
Bringing the consumer/user in the middle of our process will help a lot to adjust our mindset, as in brand architecture the design has more to consider in contrast to conventional architecture.
To conclude the introduction to Design Thinking, I decided to create a poster with a summary of the things we did. This poster was placed on our workspace and it now stands there as a reminder of the initiative to introduce these new methodology to our way of working at MDLab.
I would love to hear from you. If you have comments, questions, suggestions or just want to say hi, drop me a line:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-garcia-39415a107
Portfolio: http://angegarcia.com/
