Future/Next: A design activity to help your distributed team collaborate better.
In the face of social distancing and self-isolation, we’ve quickly shifted into crisis management mode — reacting to transform face-to-face interactions into digital experiences. However, as we begin to settle into this ‘new normal’, it’s important to step back and reflect on how best to support collaboration across our distributed teams.
Teams are often diverse groups of people, rich and insightful in their respective disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences. These communities are extremely valuable but can be equally vulnerable and fragile, particularly when people are feeling stressed, anxious and under pressure.
We know that constructing and conducting collaborative work digitally can be challenging. With reduced social interaction, team members can quickly feel isolated and disengaged. For those recently-formed collaborations (e.g. unexpectedly moved online due to COVID-19), the critical process of negotiating a shared language and setting transparent expectations becomes infinitely harder.
To nurture connectivity within our teams, we need to recognise and revalue the importance of social relationships, working to generate and foster social capital: those ties which promote trust, mutual understanding, reciprocity, identity, and belonging.
Design and collaboration are inherently creative: crafting connections between disparate perspectives; drawing on collective skills and experiences in empathic ways, and working to co-create new shared knowledge. If we want our collaborative teams to be fully engaged, we need to harness this potential and design spaces for creative social connection.
The Future/Next activity encourages your team to be imaginative, empathic and creative. It challenges participants to work collaboratively; creating, making and building quick solutions to a given problem. This is not ‘another’ work task — rather it’s a social activity, a distraction that offers some much-needed respite from the day-to-day remoteness we’re all experiencing. More importantly, it creates an opportunity to address some of the underlying challenges of distributed collaboration.
Step 1: Set the Design Brief
This activity is framed around a ‘design brief’, a stimulus that sets out the problem area or scope; describes the aim and purpose of a project, and guides collaboration. However, the design brief does not have to be complex. In this activity, the design brief simply sets out the parameters of the design challenge and asks: ‘What is the Future/Next of….’.
Print out the stimulus cards below (or create your own) and choose three cards at random: one from the yellow context column, one from the green theme column, and finally one from the blue challenge. Together, these cards create the problem area for the brief. Give each team the same brief, but reinforce that teams can choose how they wish to interpret each card.
For example, if you choose ‘children’s playground’ + ‘biodiversity’ + ‘address climate change’ then your design brief would ask ‘What is the Future/Next of children's playgrounds and biodiversity to address climate change?’
Participants might respond by designing a piece of living playground furniture, or perhaps a new roundabout that distributes native wildflower seeds with every spin. This is a similar approach to Forced Association, you can read more about that method here.
Alternatively, why not make use of the publicly available design briefs online. The University of Sydney book Design, Think, Make, Break, Repeat offers four possible briefs whilst the RSA has a selection of student design briefs available to use as inspiration.
Step 2: Team Formation
Remember this activity is open to everyone, no design/creative/artistic experience necessary! In my PhD research, encouraging people to form design teams across disparate cohorts was often the hardest part of collaborative activity.
Team members should be encouraged to pair up or work in small groups, mixing it up to work with new people each time the activity is run. Future/Next works equally well if your team comprises of essential workers who are still physically located in the workplace.
To encourage buy-in, make sure each person identifies their design team early and ask them to submit a team name at the start of the activity.
Step 3: Set a Time Frame
This activity can be posted as a regular weekly, fortnightly or monthly challenge. Set the timeframe and let your teams know when the deadline for completion is. Remember to consider the existing work demands of your team — this shouldn’t become an onerous activity. Make explicit that each team should prioritise time within their day for this activity, using an online platform that suits them best. Often this will be group discussions via Zoom or Skype in the first instance, followed by work on a shared online whiteboard such a Miro.
Step 4: Get Designing
Each team will now design a response (or solution) to the brief. The aim of this activity is speculative, pushing people to think creatively beyond the now to reimagine what’s next. The focus on hands-on prototyping supports thinking through making and aims to pull collaborators away from their screens and encourage them to think in new ways.
Encourage your teams to make use of household materials and junk (anything they have to hand) to visualise a solution to their challenge area, creating low-fidelity but engaging prototypes. Think school classroom — not executive boardroom!
This should be a fun activity, Future/Next does not require perfect, professional or even finished prototypes. The final design can be a simple representation of the team’s idea. Remind your team that there are no right or wrong responses — it’s the different ways in which teams interpret the brief that makes this activity so engaging.
Encourage your team to set aside some regular time to iterate and develop their idea. If teams are struggling to begin, ask each team member to propose and share ten quick ideas. This instantly provides some initial content to begin refining, redesigning or combining.
Importantly, each team should also give their design a name (just like they did with their team name) — something that captures the intent, excitement and design vision behind the idea and creates a sense of ownership and belonging.
Step 5: Posting and Voting
At the end of the activity, each team should post their final idea and prototypes (e.g. images, text, video) online. Resources such as Miro and Padlet work well for sharing visual material. Critique is an important part of designing so encourage teams to take some time to review the designs posted and leave a comment or two!
Step 6: Winner, winner!
Some friendly competition can help build a community! Bring your team together, perhaps at the end of your weekly/monthly meetings and run through all the design submissions. Use Direct Poll or another similar voting application to choose the favourite idea!
Why not throw in a small token prize at the end of each challenge for the most popular design? This doesn’t need to be extravagant, a pack of post-its will do the trick!
