Why Workshop Can Bring Us More Than Our Imagination
Before starting the degree of interaction design, I consider workshop as a place for work like some studio. I did not know much about the meaning of this word, only feeling it was cool. According to some common dictionary, there are two definitions. One is a small workplace for manufacturing or handcrafts. Another is a seminar for exchanging ideas( Dictionary.com, 2017). To be honest, I still could not get through this word well until taking it into reality.
Preparation for workshop
On last Saturday of May, our team Amazing ran a workshop to push our project. Before running it, there is no doubt that we made a workshop plan together including a time plan, workshop goals, tangible outcomes and evaluation questions. The main goals of the workshop are to receive feedbacks on how students spend their time on campus and our three concepts. The workshop was planned to run for 40 minutes with 5 activities.
Here is our time plan.
0:00–0:05, Introduction: what are we going to do in this workshop and why do we run this workshop? And a warm-up activity: Draw the expression you notice on one of your fellow friends.
0:05 to 0:10, asking participants to draw the place that they visited most inside the University and what did they do there.
0:10- 0:15, asking participants to represent how much they spent on study and socializing? And where they socialize?
0:15- 0:35, asking participants to express their initial thoughts about three concepts.
0:35- 0:40, making a summary.
Reasons for our surprises
At the end of the workshop, the feedbacks, especially on our three concepts we received, were totally beyond our expectation, though the process was not perfect. These feedbacks are valuable, objective, helpful to our project. But how is in this case since these participants are not in a relative major?
1. People from different backgrounds have different minds.
Our participants are all UQ students of different majors like finance, law and biology, which made their thoughts and feedbacks diverse. For example, In terms of the third activity, participants from business major usually do not spend as much time as some engineering students, and they prefer to words to describe their life distribution, while other participants prefer to use a chart or calculating to be an answer and are willing to spend more time on studying. Also, they hold different views and questions for our concepts. Some questioned the purpose of concepts while some thought more about the interaction aspect.
2. Not designer but participants are inclined to treat designs in an objective perspective.
Designers are more easily to struggle with their ideas in a box and could not jump out until someone reminds and inspires them, which is an appropriate description to our team. All of us majors in interaction design and designers of these concepts. Therefore, we tend to think in a way with our subjective judgement in most occasions. But it was the first time for these participants to observe these concepts and as a potential target user, they could give more decent and helpful feedbacks than our other team members. Just like the feedbacks on ‘Value of universities’. Its original name is ‘Value of university’ and I changed it to the current name according to these feedbacks. They argued that the concept was like criticizing UQ and may cause some negative influence. A comparison between the current situation and dream situation would arouse more reflection. I could not deny how creative and thoughtful these feedbacks are.
3. People tend to have more passion for something new and fun.
We can clearly see that almost all participants were quite interested in these new activities that they ever experienced. Basing on it, they were more patient to understand these tasks and were willing to spend more time and energy evaluating them. Which can prove this point is that they did not leave but hoped to give us more feedbacks at the end of the workshop.
4. It is more comfortable and relaxing for people to make evaluations and criticism in a peer place.
Challenging your seniors and authority is always not a light job for most people, which makes our conclusion more acceptable since our team members are as UQ students as them. We are young and flawed, so these participants did not consider our concepts as perfect work and were inclined to criticize our ideas in their distinctive perspective. In this way, we received more valuable feedbacks beyond our expectations.
How to make the workshop better
1. Making a full preparation and well-considered plan is a priority all the time.
Before the start, we set a workshop plan in class and intended to modify this plan before running it. However, sometimes a plan did not act in our way. We planned to take a half hour to modify the plan and this was far from reality. In the half of an hour, we rushed to change five activities and still left goals and evaluation uncertain, which made the whole process of workshop incoherent and inconsistent.
2. Considering the workshop in a participant’s perspective.
Undoubtedly, designers are the brains behind the scheme, so we tend to think in our ways instead of participants, which made many activities run in another way to our surprise. A typical example is the warm-up activities. We asked participants to draw the expression they noticed on one of participants. But in the matter of fact, they looked awkward because they were not provided time for getting acquaintance. Therefore, it is necessary for designers to think in participants’ perspective, like providing participants with some time to talk and get acquainted. In this way, participants are more inclined to express and exchange their own ideas freely. The only method we used was drawing other’s expression, which did not lead any direct and effective communication.
3. Combining individual time with discussing time to receive better feedbacks.
Some people are more easily affected by others including opinions and habits. If all the activities are required to discuss together without individual time, then many people are hard to express their own ideas. Reasons for it are various, like easy to follow the lead, inferiority and so on. But only individual work is hard to inspire more creative ideas. The best way is to combine the two methods to inspire more creative ideas, which is the point pf workshop.
Real knowledge comes from practice. I learned a lot from the workshop and hope to make it better for the next time.
References:
Dictionary.com Unabridged. (2017). Retrieved from: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/workshop
How to plan and run your own workshop. (2017). Retrieved from: http://www.wexlerevents.com/plan-run-workshop/
Cultural Centre for the Dead Project. (2017). Retrieved from:
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