Wham-jam, thank you ma’am!

How a digital agency organizes a Service Jam

By: Alessandra Enriconi & Kokaew Wongpichet

A few months ago, we had the pleasure of organizing and hosting a “jam” at our denkwerk home base in Cologne — now one of 200+ jam cities around the world (Yeah!) — as part of the Global Service Jam. If you’ve “jammed” before, a great big jammer-salute to you. As for the GSJam newbs, let us break it down for you.

So, WTF is GSJ?

Each year in March, people interested in service design and UX meet at locations all over the globe for a 48-hour collaborative event. Here, they tackle tough challenges and prototype service design solutions in a single weekend with a predefined “secret” theme. Jams are about meeting new people from diverse backgrounds(cultural, disciplinary, experience-level etc.), experimenting, improvising and innovating, sharing knowledge/experience, honing your craft, learning how you work and creating things that might not have been possible alone or under different circumstances.

How does it work?

GSJam is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and working with new people. It’s a unique opportunity for creative minds to collaborate — and we love it! Anyone anywhere can participate, but there are rules for both participants and organizers (e.g. be open, be non-profit, collaborate with new people, be part of the conversation, to name a few) and all activities revolve around a predefined “secret” theme. The theme is announced by 5 pm local time on the first day and results must be posted by Sunday at 3, so that everyone is working with the same basic event structure. The challenge is to then create a functioning prototype and plan or action revolving around this theme with a team of people you don’t know with limited resources in 48 hours.

Do your thing

While there are a few basic guidelines (so that all jammers share a common experience and work on a level playing field), there’s no set jam process and organizers can shape their city’s jam as they see fit. And just because organizers are free to customize their event, doesn’t mean they are alone in doing so. There’s a very active global community that’s happy to share tips & tricks. In fact, all local organizers (experienced or not) are invited to the GSJam basecamp to share their experiences, methods and tools; to ask questions about organizing the Jam and look for twin jams (jams that share activities with each other during the 48 hours).

Jammin’ CGN-style

From March 9-11, we welcomed 23 jammers from 6 countries and various backgrounds/experience levels to the denkwerk HQ for the Cologne Service Jam. Our participants found their way to us through social media, e.g. our Facebook page and groups related to service design/design and we even scored a few registrations through Slack Communities. Why only 23? Bigger isn’t always better and while there isn’t a limit as to how many participants can attend, we opted for max. 25 people, because we wanted to get to know each jammer individually and closely guide our groups.

We conceived an agenda for our Jam that would guide participants through the four main phases of a service design process:

We then structured our activities to span the 48-hour event. On Friday, we did a meet-and-greet with our guests and revealed this year’s GSJam secret theme: “Yes, No, Yes, No, Maybe”. From there, we got down to business by forming groups and transforming the secret theme into an actionable topic through a brainwriting session. Day two was dedicated to creating a research hypothesis for the selected topic, doing user research and ideation, creating a prototype and last, but certainly not least, testing. We made our Cologne Jam as hands-on and active as possible by truly living the GSJam motto: “Doing, not talking” and “Show, don’t tell”. Participants were encouraged to make their ideas tangible at every step of the service design process. And Since all jam results must be posted on Sunday afternoon, participants spent the day refining the prototype and preparing their presentation.

The right tools for the job

If you give someone a task (even when participation is voluntary), it’s only fair that you give them the tools to complete it. As organizers and hosts, we supported our jammers not only by structuring the design process but by suggesting tools and providing templates they could use in each step of the process. These templates included traditional service design tools (stakeholder map, user journey map, system map, empathy map, fake ad, storyboard in 4 steps) and two tools we developed internally specifically for the jam (assumption canvas and metaphor wheel). Jammers weren’t required to use our tools. In fact, they were encouraged to use whatever tools or methods they were familiar with to accomplish their goals in each step.

Our objective was to give enough input so that everyone, even participants with no experience in service design, could easily develop their hypotheses into ideas, and their ideas into working (and tested) prototypes. We also invited several guest speakers to give inspirational talks that would help participants without a design background but still be interesting to those with. We scheduled these before each new phase in the process to get people into the topic and understand the objective of the activities to follow.

All’s well that ends well

We put a lot of proverbial “blood, sweat and tears” into making the Cologne Service Jam happen and are pleased with how everything turned out. We were impressed by our jammers’ curiosity about the processes and outcomes, their “yes-attitude” and willingness to try all activities and methods we threw at them. Looks like the feelings were mutual because we got very positive feedback from our participants and denkwerk. Hosting the Jam here helped raise awareness about the potential of this approach internally. In fact, we (UX) and a few developer participants are looking into how to apply this jam process to our client projects.

Oh, and in case you’re interested in our jammers’ final work results, you can find them here.

Key success criteria

They say you never forget your first time, and we definitely won’t. It was a wonderful experience with valuable takeaways. In retrospective, we noticed that there were several key factors that contributed to the success of our event. For one, you have to go beyond your role as organizer or host and play the part of a facilitator. The GSJam (and its associated local jams) is all about letting creative thought run free within predefined “boundaries”, so you’ve got to find the balance between structure and creative freedom. That’s where your role as facilitator comes into play.

“As a facilitator, it’s your job to provide structure and guidance to give your participant’s creative freedom purpose and direction, while empowering them to produce valuable (e.g., usable, insightful or testable) outcomes.“

A facilitator should …

• Be like “Big Brother”: You should see and hear everything. Since you’re not a member of a particular group and more of an “inbetweener”, make it your business to know what everyone is working on so you can nudge them into the right direction, if needed.
• Know when to take the wheel: Don’t give them a complete map, but don’t let them get stuck or wander aimlessly either. It’s okay to give hints or advice to get things rolling again.
• Play referee: Discussions and disagreements will occur. While we hope you won’t have to break up any fights, you should know when to blow the whistle. Jammers can’t afford to waste time moving in unfruitful directions or having unnecessarily lengthy discussions.
• Set clear expectations: To finish on time, the goals for each process step must be clear. You should have a good understanding of the process and expected outcomes of each activity (research insights, ideas, prototypes, test results, presentations etc.) to guide and support participants in reaching quality outcomes.
• Be a timekeeper: Time flies when you’re having fun, so make sure to closely monitor the time so the teams reach their individual session goals and a great end result.
• Prepare for curve balls: The activities you plan won’t be “one-size-fits-all” and an activity might take more or less time than expected. Use your agenda as a flexible asset you can modify to best fit team work.
• Keep it real: It’s very easy to get carried away, so keep your participants grounded and help the groups stay realistic. To do this, validate early and often.

Unlocking the GSJ potential

Hosting, organizing and participating in a jam is totally worth it and we hope after reading this the benefits will be obvious. But for the skeptics who find themselves asking “How can I apply what I learned and experienced at the jam in my everyday work?” hold tight.

We know that the hardcore jammers are cringing right now because to them it’s all about the experience, i.e. meeting other creative minds, securing future relationships, having fun. We don’t deny this, but there are certainly some useful takeaways. The jam exposes you to different activities, methods, tools, processes and knowledge etc. that you may have otherwise never come in contact with. It’d be silly to not incorporate them into your work.

So after our jam, we sat down with 5 denkwerk participants from various departments to reflect on our thoughts and experiences. The general consensus was that jams are an interesting approach that allows participants with diverse backgrounds (not necessarily designers) to work together and develop project solutions or ideas. AND it could be easily applied to client projects, e.g. a brief or pitch.

Here are some benefits of the process:

• It requires few resources (fast and agile): the project can be run in an 18-hour work cycle with a small team + one facilitator
• It promotes interdisciplinary collaboration: it’s always good involve stakeholders of different backgrounds for a well-rounded solution
• The process can develop from a very abstract level or defined brief to concrete (and validated) ideas
• It’s 100% user-centered — the process runs on constant validation from research to idea testing thereby proving that research is neither expensive nor time-consuming.

Once a jammer, always a jammer

This might’ve been our first, but it won’t be our last! It was a lot of work, but very much worth the effort. We had a lot of fun with great people, came up with a lot of interesting ideas, created solutions with real value and learned a lot from our fellow jammers and the experience itself that we can use in our everyday work.

If you’re in or near Cologne and want to join us for the next jam, keep checking our Facebook page for updates. We’d love to meet and collaborate with you! Not near our beautiful city? You’ll find a list of all jam cities and how to become one on the GSJ website.

Keep calm and JAM ON!