Running my first Design Club

Senior Product Designer Lee Jeffery talks about the road to running his first design club and how he hopes to inspire the next generation of designers.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of running my first Design Club at Simms Cross Primary School in Widnes. This is something I’ve been exploring for a few years but hasn’t come to fruition due to lack of time and not finding the right opportunity, plus the challenges faced through the pandemic.

I wanted to share my story and inspire others who might be looking to run a club. It’s been a long road getting here but through sharing my experience I hope it enables others to fast track their way into the classroom.

How the journey started…

It all started a few years back when one weekend, I was looking for an activity for me and my son Alex. It’s our thing to ‘hang out’ at weekends and find new places to go, from trampoline parks to rock climbing. This particular week I stumbled across a CoderDojo being held locally in Manchester. After spending a lot of my early career developing I thought this was pretty cool and he didn’t take much convincing. We went along and he had a lot of fun using Scratch and playing with Micro:bits.

During the day and driving home I couldn’t help but notice the lack of design focus. I know I know, I’m at a CoderDojo but the inner designer in me wanted to break a group out and go wild with the post-its. This is where it started, there was a hidden passion released that day and I was determined to teach people about design thinking.

An idea short lived…

When I got home and during the following weeks, I started to explore any design related clubs across Manchester. My initial plan was to take Alex along and take in some inspiration or find an opportunity to volunteer. I hit a few dead ends and it seemed the coding community had cracked it but us designers hadn’t quite figured it out. The passion faded and other things took priority and what seemed like a great opportunity looked like it had passed me by.

The breakthrough

Shortly after joining Auto Trader last November, I started to explore the amazing work we do supporting schools and colleges through our education outreach programme. After a chat with Sarah, one of our Future Talent Managers, we discussed the opportunities available and she introduced me to the STEM learning website. This would allow me to gain DBS certification and advertise and search for activities within my local STEM network.

After enrolling with STEM, I came across Design Club when browsing events on Meetup. This was the missing piece of the puzzle.

Jemima and Noam piloted Design Club back in 2017 and have since grown their network of volunteers and sponsors. They offer a selection of resources including workbooks and presentations accompanied with lanyards, badges and stickers to help get your club up and running.

When I think back the biggest obstacle to me was time and knowing where to begin. Utilising the Design Club framework accelerated my journey and I was now ready to promote my club and pencil in my first date.

Promoting the club

Now I was up and running, promoting the club was easy. I shared my activity on the STEM website and within a few weeks I had several requests to host a club.

Simms Cross was the first to show interest and after a short chat with one of their teachers Steph, I arranged a visit to the school to organise the day and meet the Year 6 teacher Mr Banks. Due to the distance we agreed to try out a one-day sprint workshop as opposed to a 5–6 week after school club.

Running the workshop was going to take some facilitating, Ryan Pitt — one of our Product Design Apprentices at Auto Trader, who lives locally in Widnes agreed to help co-facilitate. Our team was now ready to run our first club.

Starting the day

We started the day enrolling the children into the Design Club. This gets everyone excited and each designer gets their own Design Club lanyard and we agree to the club rules.

• Care — Care about the needs of people
• Create — Talk less, make more, share ideas
• Investigate — Be curious, ask questions
• Collaborate — Work together, do things as a team
• Iterate — Start somewhere, keep improving ideas
• Energise — Be optimistic, create a positive energy

Now everyone’s ready to start we share some background about Auto Trader as a company and the role of a Product Designer.

To keep the children engaged we keep this interactive asking questions and also focus on our educational background and our progression through school and college so they can further understand the journey we’ve been on as individuals.

We also ran a quick activity asking the children to write down their favourite app or website and list the reasons why they like it. The children then played back their thoughts to the class, this helped demonstrate commonalities between people but highlight differences, getting them to think about how they might build an app that meets everyone’s needs, putting their own likes and biases aside.

Project teams

Now we’d given context on the role of a designer we split the groups into smaller project teams so they can work together to discuss ideas and role play later when testing. We assigned each team a project name to introduce some new design related vocabulary, these included:

• Team Collaborate
• Team Empathy
• Team Ideate
• Team Prototype
• Team Iterate

In our project teams it was time to analyse the design process and try to put it in order from start to finish. This helped introduce each design stage to the children, allowing them to further understand what each stage would involve.

Stage 1: Define a challenge

To get the children started we came up with a few challenges but also gave them the option to choose one themselves.

This stage was quite important as it would outline the rest of the day. We gave the teams the choice of tackling a challenge as a team or breaking out into smaller groups but still using the larger team to discuss and help each other throughout the tasks.

This is where we started working in our exercise books, providing additional worksheets if children wanted to explore more ideas.

Stage 2: Empathise with people

Now we’d framed our challenges it was time to empathise and put ourselves in the shoes of the user. Here the children explored a few exercises from creating a user profile, building an empathy map and mapping out a typical day.

There was some good discussion during these tasks which led to one group highlighting that their app would only be used in the late afternoon or evening due to being at school during the day. One designer had the idea of adding a dark mode to the app to help with reading when it got dark outside. It was amazing to see them identifying these opportunities from these initial activities.

Stage 3: Ideate possibilities

Before starting the ideation round we gave the children a short 10 minute break to get some fresh air. We continued the discussion from Stage 2 and started to think about what kind of features our app might include. This is where the children got creative, making an app name and logo and then exploring our “how might we” statements.

Stage 4: Prototype your design

After a break for lunch the children came back into class energised and raring to go. It was key here to spend a few minutes reflecting on the mornings session and reviewing the features we’d prioritised and how these might fit into a flow of screens.

We started to plan our navigation and chat about what elements make up a typical app. We spoke about buttons and interactions such as swipe and touch, also thinking about how we might navigate through menus and back buttons.

It was time to start arranging designs into clickable prototypes, we handed out iPads and used the Marvel app to arrange our designs into a clickable prototype. We gave some quick instructions to each group to get them started and they picked up the Marvel app controls in no time.

As we started to build out our prototypes some designers identified areas where screens were missing or the app could be improved so we quickly sketched these ideas to help complete the prototypes ready for testing.

Stage 5: Test your design

The class was now ready to test their designs and each group was eager to show off their newly designed app. People paired up and ran a mini test to get feedback.

Here we outlined the importance of user testing and how we could improve designs from the insights found when asking questions and observing people using our apps.

We also started to look at planning a user test and how we can use open and closed questions to gain different types of feedback.

Sharing and celebrating

After a fun packed day, it was time to wind down and start to reflect on the journey we’d been on. Each project team shared their story with the class, outlining their challenge and showcasing their designs and prototype. We asked the teams which stages of the process they enjoyed the most and what things they may do differently from the feedback received during testing.

After each project team finished sharing, each team member was awarded with a certificate and a round of applause from the class. Celebrating a job well done!

It was then time to hand out the prestigious ‘Designers of the day’ awards. We selected 3 individuals from the group who tackled each stage with energy and enthusiasm, caring about others and producing a well thought out app. The reward was a Visual Thinking Workbook so they could continue their ideation and sketching skills. We also gave out some design club badges to celebrate everyone’s hard work so nobody felt left out and they could take another souvenir home to remind them of the day.

How to get involved

Running my first Design Club was such a rewarding experience, it’s fascinating to see the wonderful ideas children come up with and how they embrace learning new ways of thinking.

If you’re looking to run a club my advice would be ‘just do it’. The support and resources offered on the Design Club site make it simple and easy to get started.

I really hope this story inspires others to get involved and who knows it may be the missing piece that helps you get on the right path.

Good luck and feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need advice.