Hacking design challenges together can be twice as fun!
Just before summer vacations officially started we gathered all our design troops together for one last design challenge before well-deserved break. We do this as a team on regular basis to ensure we get to spend a little time together as during normal work days we work in different projects, in different cross-functional teams, in different cities. Getting everybody together allows us to share knowledge and experiences within our design competence group, to build trust and psychological safety with the peers in our team, as well as to simply have fun with similar minded (and very cool!) colleagues.
Our approach was to open up both of our teams, mix people up, and tackle design challenges in cross-company wide teams.
This time, to spicy things up, we decided to join forces with Solita’s design team, led by Mikko Väätäinen, and meet up in Helsinki capital area for a day of action and learning. Our approach was to open up both of our teams, mix people up, and tackle challenges in cross-company wide teams. This way our team members would not only share new insights and knowledge but could also learn from new people and their ways of working.
Everybody was encouraged to bring a topic on the table, and eventually — with the help of dot-voting — we landed on selecting three cases.
Divide and conquer — cross-company teams’ co-creation exercise
We planned the day with the idea that people could choose what they’d like to work on and how to work on it. Our team members presented a few commonly interesting topics and split into smaller cross-company groups to crack these challenges. Everybody was encouraged to bring a topic on the table, and eventually — with the help of dot-voting — we landed on selecting three cases: eMobility related home charging service, solar panels solution for retail, and university alumni life-long learning platform. Each team had a subject matter expert in the team who acted like a PO throughout the day. Others simply threw in their creative minds.
The aim for the teams was to cover the customer needs for each of the cases as well as to innovate on different solutions to alleviate the customer pains.
The aim for the teams was to cover the customer needs for each of the cases as well as to innovate on different solutions to alleviate the customer pains. Based on these discussions, the teams were expected to do a prototype (of any kind) and test it out with external people in order for them to validate their key hypothesis. Our day ended on a short pitching of the outcomes from each of the case teams as well as enjoying lovely home-made ice cream at the Helsinki Musiikkitalo terrace.
“I ended the day feeling happier and more fulfilled”
As a team we got both managed to get quite far in some of the cases and got a lot of food for thought for our daily work. For example, our eMobility case made it to the prototyping phase where we started drafting a few UI sketches on the iPad, which were later transferred on the mobile, ready to be tested. Unfortunately, the day ended too fast before the actual testing could start. However, thanks to this exercise, our eMobility lead designer got fresh inspiration from the day and took these prototyped designs further. He is currently organizing a real experiment based on this work to get validated learnings from it.
All in all, the day resulted in many happy faces, new ideas, and a more tighter design team. Apart from the smiley faces, we also got happy feedback such as “I ended the day feeling happier and more fulfilled”, and “Thanks for organizing it! Turned out to be quite useful since the exercise we did is one of the first things I have to tackle back in the office.” Co-creation outside the office with external team members can really spark the creativity and bring some additional boost to the “normal” day-to-day work. Very much recommended!
Have a (co-)creative summer!
