Helping People Learn, Collaborate and Innovate — with Shirley Lam

Published in

Friends of Figma Hong Kong 🇭🇰

6 min readJul 19, 2022

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Meet Shirley, a member of our FoF HK community. She’s a digital marketing communications lead at Stryker as well as a learning facilitator for experience design at H Academy.

I am a digital change facilitator who communicates design values to help people collaborate and innovate.

What inspired you to pursue design? How did you start getting into it?

My journey touches on a lot of different parts of the design. Design actually started out as a hobby. During uni, I started learning Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on my own. That’s when I discovered how design can be a tool to express information, which helped with my journalism background.

Life at a digital marketing agency as the creative lead

After graduating, I practiced my design skills in digital marketing for advertising. At that time, design was not only used to express information but also in solving business problems and building brand voice. However, I felt limited to just marketing and sales, so I joined a UX bootcamp to help me think from users’ perspectives. This was a turning point that opened my eyes to the different facets of design, including facilitation design.

“Facilitation is the art of leading people through processes towards agreed-upon objectives in a manner that encourages participation, ownership and creativity by all those involved,” Robert Cserti, co-founder of SessionLab

I discovered facilitation design — and I really enjoyed designing the process to help people learn, collaborate and innovate. After gaining a year of learning facilitator experience at H Academy, I knew it would be a lifelong interest for me.

I shifted my focus from doing design work to teaching design thinking to working adults.

What interested me about facilitation design is that it also involves science (one of my interests in secondary school). Similar to scientists, facilitation designers need to go through lots of trial and error — seeing improvements and getting feedback in order to make experiences better. There’s also a lot of psychology involved, like methods of how to stay neutral and how to get people to start talking.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced with design?

Everyone has different perspectives of what design is, and how to translate that into their common language so that they understand is the most difficult part. Learning more about their perspectives and how they think really helps.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My home is my office. I’m in a remote set-up for work on the APAC team — so my teammates are not in HK. All meetings and work are done virtually. I wear multiple hats throughout the day: Architect, Pilot, and Guide.

9 am: When I get up, I have a coffee. I look at what meetings I have to attend and do some pre-work as an Architect i.e. understand who’s in the meeting, read through related documents, write down a high-level agenda or prepare online whiteboard templates (especially for bigger groups or brainstorming sessions) to make sure every meeting is planned in a way to best serve the group needs. If I have time, I will quickly rehearse the flow in my mind and prepare backups for any worse cases. I spend 3 hours of focus time in the morning before lunch.

12 pm: During my break, I will do something that doesn’t involve lots of intensive thinking to declutter my mind, like doing chores or feeding my cat. I also work on side projects or connect with students at H Academy.

1 pm: Most meetings happen in the afternoon and I have to pay full attention as a Pilot to observe the group energy, body language and look out for any moments that may disrupt meeting outcomes. In an ideal situation, I facilitate by only asking questions to create more understanding between the people.

6 pm: I reflect on any doubtful moments of the day and document them so that they can be addressed in the next planning. I’ll go on LinkedIn to see if there’s anything interesting happening around me. I usually attend a workshop or learn something new before I sleep to stay resourceful as a Guide. For example, I have German classes at 10 pm.

Facilitators’ roles explained in 4 minutes

What is your current workspace setup?

My home setup supports hybrid meetings — iMac (main stage view), iPhone (mobile users’ view), MacBook Pro (backend setting), and a second screen (instant communication and audience engagement)

Facilitating UX Bootcamp — multiple cameras and microphones are connected to show slides, Classroom view, remote instructor view, and stage view

Time Timer is used during in-person workshops to visualize the time left of each activity

What are your go-to or “must-have” apps?

Notion — for documenting all my thoughts
Discord — for community events and teaching
Figma, Miro — for day-to-day collaboration
LinkedIn — for networking and connection
Instagram — a source of inspiration
Canva — for graphics and easy online collaboration

Is there a product that recently impressed you? Can be digital or physical.

mymind — I used to have to think about where I wanted to put some images and how to save them in an organized way. I think mymind is really intuitive and I like how it automatically tags. Really great for visual learners.
Readwise — They will send your a newsletter of your Kindle highlights every day. This helps me get refreshed of what I highlighted in the past and organize them in a way that matters to me.

What is your favourite part about Figma?

It’s not just a design tool — it’s a community with an iterative culture. They keep releasing new features and have expanded the usage to non-designers. They’ve built a culture of people collaborating and contributing daily. This is very helpful if we need to facilitate online collaboration.

FoF HK has leveraged FigJam to facilitate note-taking for participants to maximize their learnings during #config2022

What is your favourite afternoon snack? Or midnight snack?

Kinder Bueno chocolate. I like the sweetness and crunchiness!

What is a book you read recently? Or what is your favourite book?

The Art of Focused Conversations — it’s a book I learned about from my facilitation course. It introduces the ORID framework (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional level of thinking) which is a method of conducting focused conversations by following a natural sequence of how people think. It’s shifted my thinking from the past and it’s really scientific. I can use this method in work and life.

The Art of Focused Conversation has recently been translated into Chinese for Asian countries and Chinese readers.

What’s something in Hong Kong that inspires you? Could be a person, a place, an object, or anything in HK!

The resilience of people. We are very flexible. We’re used to having limited resources and coming up with lots of creative solutions.

I also love that in HK you can go anywhere for an hour, meet a lot of people, and do a lot of things. It’s all convenient.

Share three pieces of advice for fellow design community members.

Find your ikigai. It’s a Japanese concept of finding your purpose in life. There are 4 circles: something you like, something you’re good at, something people will pay you for, and something the world needs. In the centre is ikigai.