How to Design Ideation Workshop?

For a long time, I research methods and try to attend some varied workshops. But I haven’t been in a creation part of these and so I had no strong idea that how they designing and conducting. A few days ago, for a first time, I designed and conducted ideation workshop with my colleague and I would like to share my first experiences about this process as a beginner.

Before telling the process, it could be useful to explain “what is ideation and why is it important”. Simply, ideation is generating new ideas and also is one of the stages of design thinking process. Especially, for companies, it is so important to trigger for employees related to creating products. Because in some cases, employees work hard but they couldn’t find time or environment to create new ideas. As a result, it could be hard to find new ideas for new products or creative solutions needed for existing products.

One day, a team needed new ideas about their projects and our workshop experience began. We were willing to carry out ideation workshop and started to plan how we start.

Before the Workshop
This part was almost about research and planning.
We asked following questions and did research in frame of them;

• How can we define activity series as a workshop?
• What is an ideation?
• What are the objectives of the workshop?
• Which activities support these objectives of the workshop?

After researching and discussing, we decided to a structure included four main sessions as lots of implementers do;

• Warm up
• Exploring (idea generation)
• Focusing
• Sharing

The next step was a selection of methods for all stages. We searched on the internet and also checked some sources and we loved one of them; it was a book “Gamestorming” that is really useful for all type innovation activities.

From this book, we found appropriate methods and redesigned a childhood game for warming session of the workshop.

In parallel with the research part, we made arrangements for time, place and equipment. For time arrangement, we draw the line and tried to divide parts related to methods and possible abilities of participants. Also, we conducted pre-workshop with shorter time and we measured approximate time we needed.

After all this preparation process, the list we had for workshop day was as follows;

• Workshop presentation included session information and brief of methods
• Time plan
• List of participants and team information
• Equipment list
• Templates to be distributed to participants and notes on how to distribute
• Music list

Workshop Day
I highly recommend that being earlier than a starting time at workshop place. We were one hour before. So we had enough time to do table plan and equipment check.

In the beginning of the workshop, we were so excited but as the hours passed, telling some points and directing participants became easier.

During the workshop, not everything was as we expected, but thanks to planning and correct choice of methods, we did not have any problems to affect the workshop.

After the Workshop
When all participants left, we collected papers filled during the workshop. In following three days, we gathered videos and photos. With all gathered data, we prepared the report and summarised outputs to share all stakeholders.

If you are going to organize a workshop for the first time like us, it might be helpful to pay attention to the following issues, which I learned from this experience;

• You could avoid giving too large or too short times for sessions, and if possible, to make time setting clear, you could conduct a pilot workshop.
• Especially in the part of the idea generation, music could support the participants and change the energy in the environment. So you could conduct your workshop with music that can be listened to soft and the background.
• It may be good if you have a method for adjusting the time that participants adapt; such as turning up the music volume on during sessions, and reducing the volume of the music when you explain something.
• You might encounter situations that vary according to the interest and mode of the participants. So you could use a few different methods as a backup, depending on the need.