How We Created an Interaction Design Lab and Organized a Design Camp

17 min readSep 5, 2016

This summer with a bunch of fellow mentors and lecturers from MOME (the leading applied arts university in Hungary) we organized our first design camp and it was a blast. We worked through a 3-day design sprint with research, ideation and prototyping and the results were beyond our expectations. This is the story of how this whole thing came to be in the first place, and what we created in those three days and took away with us.

The MOME Interaction Design Lab: from 2013 to 2016

The place we built our nest in is the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, which is the most prestigious and leading educational institution for design and applied arts in Hungary. It hosts departments for design, architecture, media and theoretical studies, and within design it provides specializations for product design, fashion and art. This setup was spiced up in 2013 when the Interface Design course started by the work of Thomas Fogarasy and Gábor Suhajda who tried to help the university build up this new leg to develop skills applicable in the current world and labor market.

I joined this endeavour early on as a lecturer at the adult education course, which was the pilot for the whole operation. But the true mission was always to take all this knowledge, expand it to cover all areas on the broader spectrum of interaction design and offer it as a state-funded course for the students of the university. We have been working on this ever since and in 2015 we founded the MOME Interaction Design Lab as a semi-independent institution of the university to cover these courses for those interested.

Main building of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design

We are still hard at work communicating and collaborating with the university to figure out the proper and official format to do this, the curriculum is a constant work in progress, but still, we are teaching 16 students each semester to develop skills they have never had the opportunity to pick up before. And watching them learn, evolve and sometimes find their true calling in what we see as our job and craft is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had.

It is really powerful to see the result and impact of our work. These past years of mentoring and educating 30–40 people per semester (the university students plus the adult education course still running in parallel) had a true impact on the labor market in Budapest, Hungary. There is bunch of designers who learned with us and the biggest takeaway they always had was gaining a serious feel for the human factor and obtaining this human-centered designer view on everything they create, critique or just look at. But apart from that another thing that we have by now, which is equally powerful is our alumni. This bunch of people that we know and are all great and bright minds equipped with their superpowers we just helped a little to kickstart but they nurtured and built upon with care.

Today, this alumni is our superpower.

We can summon them with a calling and yet again they come and we can create awesome things together. This is a posse of designers, creators, problem solvers and makers. They are also not our students anymore, they are our colleagues, fellow thinkers and believers. Just like us they also believe that we can make a difference in the world when we work together.

So this is what we do. We try to keep in touch with them and once in a while call them to gather around and make a difference. And of course develop our skills ever further together.

The Camp Idea, Summer of 2016

For me the whole thing started by listening to The Collective Podcast by Ash Thorp. It was the 91st episode and he was having this quite lengthy and friendly talk with Ghostshrimp, aka Dan Bandit. The guy was super inspiring with his stories about his life, decisions he made, his relation to the work he did on Adventure Time, and finally he came to the topic of the Ghostscouts Training Camp. And it just hit me: a training camp for designers, that is what we need.

At the time I got obsessed with this idea that all of the designers I know are these urban, capital city people who are greatly interesting, have bold visions and all that, but there is a part of many of our life experiences that we lack. We need to learn more discipline, self control, train our bodies more harshly so that it can refresh our minds, and have some belief that we can go out into the wild and survive without our GPS turned on. I had this vision to create our own training camp for designers with our own alumni, and I wanted to do this.

Then we didn’t do exactly this but something close. I discussed with my fellow organizers at the IxD Lab and what we could agree on is to do the camp and definitely bring it down to manual work and having nothing digital. Well, I couldn’t get them to also have exercises and physical work in the schedule but maybe next time. Anyway, what we ended up having was a design camp with our laptops left at home, solving everything with our brains and anything that we could get a manual hold of. And it was a fantastic experience.

Lake Balaton, the designated place for our design camp

MOME IxD Camp Theme, Team Setup and the 3-Day Schedule

We found the perfect spot for the camp at Lake Balaton, the primary summer destination within Hungary and the largest lake in all Central Europe. Along its 236 kilometers of shores it hosts beaches, apartments and hotels, small and authentic villages, sailer ports and all what a waterfront can offer to draw tourists from close and afar. Our chosen place was Balatonkenese, a small village of about 2500 souls in the corner of the lake closest to the capital where we were coming from.

Balaton may be a highly in-demand spot for tourists, but for us it was the ultimate resource of Things To Be Done. We agreed early on with the organizing team that the camp theme will be about discovering local issues and working on them. We were not too specific about this first because we didn’t know what we could find there. It could have been a good local story to build some narrative upon, or a specific problem of the inhabitants of the village that we could help solve. The only specific plan we had was to do field research to delve into the local life and use design thinking methodology to carry out a project.

The camp collective consisted of four teams, each having four participants from our alumni people and two mentors from the lecturer pool of our courses. This size and amount of participants proved to be a perfect fit. A pool of four people was ideal to work together without the feel of coordination fatigue, and two mentors could have this great balance of passing the driving force role back and forth to keep the team always moving forward.

When we arrived to the premises in the evening before Day 1 we quickly arranged a self-introductions round and divided the people into the four teams and assigned the mentors for them. Then it was their turn to discuss what topic they would like to work on. This was something that could be altered and pivoted the next day while doing research but everyone needed a path to start heading down on. We suggested topics like dealing with the problems of such areas as garbage pollution, quality of water, locals vs. tourists, accommodation experience, the village as a service, and some rather fun areas like beach time, sports or sailing.

Each team was supposed to pick a high-level topic for their work in the coming days and the first night was all about casual chatting around that, sharing thoughts, and also getting to know each other a little better.

We handed out a little booklet having all the important information for the days ahead

As the next days’ schedule went the main track was to do a 3-day, condensed version of a Design Sprint:

Day 1, field research: pinpoint the topic, specify the brief for yourself, dig up related information, explore, talk to people, observe and ask, collect artefacts.
Day 2, discover & decide: think of solutions for your chosen problem area and design brief, generate ideas, diverge and converge, iterate, brainstorm collaboratively, come to conclusions together, specify solution.
Day 3, prototype & deploy: create the solution, build it without any digital tools, put it out there, set your solution in motion, and observe it. Also, at the end of Day 3 each team has to present their prototype to the rest of the camp people.

So, this was the plan. And now I’m telling you the story of how it actually played out with my team, and how we created something truly great in just these three unbearably short days.

Creating the Wall of Balatonkenese

On the first evening before Day 1 I got assigned to a team of four bright bunch of UX and visual designers, and shared mentoring with Thomas who started the whole MOME ID course in the first place. Now, this was a dream team to begin with.

As for our topic we chose to concentrate on the local people with their local problems as locals of the village.

We didn’t want to delve into tourism and how they cope with or serve that, we rather wanted to focus on their lives outside the peak months of the summer. What are their most burning issues? What do they lack so much that they talk about it among themselves? If there is a village assembly what is the key topic that keeps coming up? And how could we address that pain and solve it without a large budget but mere willingness to make a change and hoping to make true difference?

Day 1: From Talking to People to Having the Slightest Idea

On the first day we set out to the village with just a notebook and pen on each of us to collect stories and insights regarding our topic. We split up the team of six into three groups of two so that we can cover as much research as possible but there should always be one person to talk and another to make notes in an interview situation.

Going out for field research, notepads at hand, interview frenzy

We came across very different people. We met a street sweeper who felt completely emotional for the village, someone crawling in a pub trashing the local community, some skateboarding kids looking forward to starting high school so that they can regularly travel to a city, local business owners who were either enthusiastic or less so about their fellow villagers. There were so many topics and so many opinions within just a few hours that we couldn’t imagine how this will all add up to one specific problem to solve.

And then we sat together with the team to share our stories and notes and suddenly it just came together. Whoever we talked to there was this canonical issue coming up all the time that there is not enough and not good programs for the locals. There were a few concerts, sometimes a movie night or such, but people either didn’t know about the events or they thought these were not for their interests. What we could also observe and what they seemingly didn’t notice themselves was that they never felt to be an active participant in making a change about their own situation. The complaints were there but the solutions was never thought of collectively.

We realized that this is our mission, this is our calling, this is what we can fix here. We just needed to articulate it better for ourselves so it was time to head back to the HQ, start building our war room and so the wall of stickies started to shape up. We addressed every problem of the locals that we heard by writing a sticky note of it and put it up the wall, then organized these into groups. We also created two distinct personas to represent the local characters, and drew up their empathy maps to see their thoughts, feelings and needs.

We also collected a great amount of artefacts from all around the village. We could get hold of the local monthly magazine, we took a bunch of photos in some common spaces (like the main square, pubs, the community center), found leaflets of some events, and also brought along some random items to represent our feel for the village (a piece of toy we randomly received with a lunch, a four-leaf clover, etc.). These were all great to spice up and give some personality for our war room wall.

Our war room wall on Day 1: problem topics and clusters, persona-based empathy maps and artefacts

Having all this on the wall and the groups of problems showing the main areas of interest we could get a really good grasp of what issue we are going to address here.

The main areas at this point were:

Fix distribution of information: people have to know about the programs happening around them, there has to be some central means of sharing information.
Foster proactivity: they have to realize that if there is nothing going on they can do something about that themselves.
Collect feedback: they can only make things better if they know what went wrong in the first place, so we need to find a way to enable them to make themselves heard by sharing opinions.
Have a space for programs: many voices addressed the lack of places where events can be organized, however there can be several agoras which are naturally available although not realized and utilized.

We also visualized our findings by creating the user journey maps of our personas where we started from the emerging of the need for something to do, up until the stage of sharing feedback on an event that has happened. As we mapped up the stages and the user feelings we could see where the important pain points were and could start ideating on how to intervene to have a positive impact.

Day 2: From the Sea of Ideas towards the One Solution

We kicked off the second day with some leftovers from Day 1 to cover: we needed to finish up our user journey maps. However it was not entirely distinct from our Day 2 objectives since we could add a couple of suggestions to it, which were more about thoughts for solutions than documenting the current state. Although after finishing off this duty did we go deep into generating a myriad of solution concepts and ideas.

Collaborative brainstorming in action, outside and in the war room as well

We didn’t go down the road of a proper Design Studio process by diverging and converging continuously or critiquing and building upon generated ideas to end up with one solution. Instead we discussed the main areas that we want to address and went diverging upon diverging and just generated as many ideas as we possibly could. Probably the reason for this was that we felt a pressure of time and didn’t want to end up narrowing down our possibilities to one end and finally realize we were not happy with where we ended up.

We wanted to keep our spectrum wide and have an ocean of possibilities to choose from, and at the end do one big decision making process to find our final solution.

And this was what we just did.

We had four big problem areas that we wanted to explore:

Seeding of information
Proactivity
Gathering feedback
Communal spaces

For our brainstorming sessions we used Crazy Eights and 6–3–5 Brainwriting to collaboratively generate the most amount of solution suggestions in the least amount of time. After every session we discussed the outcomes and even extended them further or expanded upon certain elements. We didn’t have the time to create proper solutions sketches but in many cases we were thinking by drawing storyboards or sketches of a usage situation. After having all sessions done we put all ideas on the wall to have a good overview of them all.

We just wanted to start the decision making process when we realized we were still lacking something. We knew what the problems were that we wanted to solve but we didn’t have the common understanding of how we wanted to solve them. We needed some anchor regarding what our values were that we share and that drives our decisions. So right when we thought we were almost ready we opened up a whole new chapter and started a process of creating design principles. We quickly did a solo work of coming up with principles and then discussed them together and used a quick and simple rating to sort them out. Not just was it helpful but also a truly rewarding experience since the whole team got a much better hold of what we were shooting for in terms of vision.

Design principles ideation and a quick and simple voting

With our design principles at hand it was much easier to start the decision making process on our ideas. The system was simple and straightforward: everybody had ten round stickers to distribute among all of the ideas with a face value ranging from 10 to 1. When everyone put the votes on the wall we summed up the vote values, took the top crop and let go of the rest. This pretty much shaped our final solutions, we just needed to combine the best batch of ideas into one implementation.

We had a quite specific vision but couldn’t quite reach the specification of our solution by the end of this day. So we had a tough day ahead of us when we needed to work out every detail of our implementation and also create and deploy the whole thing.

Day 3: The Grand Plan and Building the Wall

Honestly, we had been talking about the idea in different forms and details from Day 1 but it didn’t quite come together in such specific way and completeness as on Day 3. We melted everything together and there it was, our solution for all the identified problems we wanted to solve, and it was a wall: The Wall of Balatonkenese.

Crafting The Wall — sometimes it was not an easy job to keep it together

Our solution concept consisted of the following elements:

The people of the village need a common space that they can share, freely inhabit and organize any kind of programs that they want without any centralized approval. This was our answer to the communal spaces problem especially by using a commonly available area just by the port, which could be any other available space in the village, really.
The space needs a wall, The Wall, which has two sides.
On one side of the wall there is a large event calendar, which contains all the programs for the upcoming few weeks. This should help the distributing of information so that everyone can see in the communal area what is happening in the near future.
Just by the calendar we put up a bunch of pre-created forms with a pen for posting any event idea on the wall. It is just like the physical version of Facebook events and may help people to be proactive about organizing programs for themselves.
The other side of the wall is a memory keeper. Anyone can add anything to that space let it be a photo, a love note, a plastic beer cup — you just stick or pin it up. This is the time capsule for any given timeframe and when it’s full they take a photo, upload it to a Facebook page’s album, wipe the board clean and start over. This way the wall always contains the latest memories but everything from the past is also available to see online.
In the corner of the flip side of the board there is a feedback box with a handful of feedback cards, so if there is anything to say, add or suggest, it is easily available.

One added layer that we came up with and added a bit of a spin to the story was the #kenesevagyok (meaning ‘I am Kenese’, or #iamkenese) campaign. We realized that if want to reach out to each and every inhabitant of the village we need to give them some unifying calling, a brand that they can all relate to. Making them proud of their village and their origins is a feeling that many can be easily moved by. And also if we make it look good and communicate in a way as current social media activity would suggest (i.e. in the form of a hashtag) youngsters may also be able to relate to the idea.

The memory keeper side of the wall with the feedback box

This was our great design and master plan. We had everything in our heads we just needed to arrange the space, create the wall, fill it with some content to start with and put it out into the wild to live. And we had half a day left, so time was the greatest challenge again. However we managed to do more than just an MVP version of our solution. I think it was a pretty solid paper prototype, which could fully function and deliver everything we planned with.

Once the elements came together and we were ready with our product we put it out beside the port and sit down to watch it breath, which it started to do really quickly. As some people came along they instantly started looking at it, exploring both of its sides and trying the functionalities it provided. Some kids came up to us within just a few minutes and asked if they could put up some events on the calendar, or if they could write some feedback cards to drop into the feedback box.

We were totally awed and smiled from ear to ear as we couldn’t believe how quickly our little brainchild took on the life of its own.

It was one hell of a ride through three super intense days but at the end looking at the product we created with our bare hands we were so proud and satisfied. I did not feel any fatigue, not even the days after, as I was inspired to my very bones by the whole process of creating something new from scratch to delivery in just three days.

The Wall in use: children instantly started interacting with our creation

Final thoughts and some takeaways

Creating and preparing the design camp is not easy since you cannot specifically prepare for what is going to happen or how things are going to play out. When the whole thing is designed to be adjusted to the local capabilities and conditions you can only design the process and not the content. It can be intimidating at first and tough to let go.

Being a designer is the most awesome thing when you get to experience that your job is about solving problems. Especially when you are not just pushing pixels around but have the chance to go out, be on the field, get a feel of the context and your users and create something there and for them. Even better when you can have the chance to involve them in the ideation and creation process.

Our war room corner at the end of the 3-day process

A design sprint can be carried out in three days but with a rush. If you choose to do a 3-day sprint it is a good idea to give more time for exploration and research, and have a very specific and timeframed process for ideation and decision making. This will help to calculate with more time for the articulation of the problem, which it will take anyway, and get you better prepared for the rest of the sprint, which is more easy to carry out in a very structured way and on the clock.

With the MOME IxD Lab we most certainly have the best alumni of problem solving designers in Hungary. Working with them is always a blast, they are full of energy and are always ready to be a maker. Besides planning our next semester and already looking into the possibilities of a next design camp, we are probably having more kinds of events to get together and do some good out there.