Play to Learn: How a Makeathon Can Nurture Creativity
Tips for hosting a collaborative event that centers ideation, fun, and togetherness
One uneventful Thursday evening, I had a light-bulb moment — we often do our best work when we optimize for our creativity, not just our productivity.
Last year, I was responsible for coordinating a makeathon for IDEO Last Mile Money. Our team wanted to kick off a new work cycle on an inspired note while experimenting with new technologies and provocative ideas. A makeathon was the perfect format: teams are asked to build something quickly within a specific timeframe, thus accelerating learning — and failing — in a low-stakes environment. With a curiosity to explore emerging tech (generative AI, decentralized tools and platforms, etc.), we wanted to see what creative new ideas we could unlock.
At IDEO, creativity is a core part of Human-Centered Design, and we believe it drives innovation. The makeathon was a moment to keep pushing how we embody creativity.
With a remote, global team spread across five countries and a 10-hour time difference, I also had to get creative with my planning. Here are some of the tools I tested out to build a supportive, creative environment for the makeathon — and the prototypes we built along the way.
A gaggle of GIFs
On the makeathon kick-off call, we invited the teams to use GIFs to articulate how they were currently feeling — as well as how they wanted to feel at the end of Makeathon. This activity was fun and wacky, even a little silly. However, it helped kickstart the makeathon on a note of play and togetherness, which is especially important to cultivate in a remote setting.
This is what we collectively came up with.
An interactive blueprint to the event
We gave each team a Figma map to provide a blueprint for the 48 hours of the makeathon. Maps like these are important because they help a diverse team of designers creatively collaborate.
Here are some of the key features we built into our maps:
- Prompts (e.g. What are your superpowers? What are our working agreements?) helped each team align on the brief and their way of working together.
- Spaces for teams to document their work — complete with sections to flesh out user journeys and personas, and a jam board for ideas and prototype concepts.
- Tools to jot down notes from live feedback — notes on what ‘I love’ and ‘I wonder’ for each team’s share.
Design crits that don’t feel like criticism
Any well-designed experience has a strong closing moment. At the end of an exhilarating prototyping process in the makeathon, it was important to celebrate and reflect on the work we had done.
We used IDEO’s design review cards to push how we reviewed design work. The design crit cards helped us review the prototypes by how they embodied unexpected but inspiring elements such as beauty, bravery, mastery, and magic.
Celebrating our wins
I was really inspired by what the team was able to make in such a short time.
One team deep-faked photos of themselves to experiment with how emerging technologies can be used to build AI-powered chatbot support, using D-iD, Synthesia, murf.ai, and Noah’s Ark. This was a fresh approach to building a tech-driven scalable support solution for mobile-money agents who often ask for responsive, technical help from financial providers, but don’t always get it.
Agents are often digitally fluent with feature phones and increasingly smartphones, but many are unfamiliar with new technologies — and fear the risks they may pose. Agents often struggle to expand their customer base and leverage tech tools and social media for marketing campaigns. The team showcased examples of how agents can use emerging tech to create curated and gamified marketing campaigns and manage their customer base. They experimented with Midjourney and Dall-E to create visual marketing campaigns that inspire trust and curiosity. They also showed examples of how ChatGPT-3 would respond to common questions that mobile agents have.
Another team created a library of web3 design patterns. The library showcased starter ideas, prototypes, and insights on redesigning “key moments” in a user journey. The prototypes were simple sketches. However, this team created 20 redesigned UX prototypes in only two days!
This was possible because our focus was on making new ideas tangible — not making them perfect. The makeathon created time and space to play around with unfamiliar technologies, making them feel much less intimidating.
A moment to reflect on the past — and the future
To end the event, we held a moment for reflection on what we just built and to envision the future. Our rapid prototypes helped us generate ideas for bigger projects and initiatives we wanted to tackle later in the year. For example, the design-pattern library to improve web3 products inspired us on new ways to build out the Financial Confidence Playbook which we launched later in 2023!)
What did I reflect on, as the person responsible for planning the event? My biggest takeaway was not just to use the makeathon as a means to create prototypes, but also to inspire the team, boost our creativity, and give us a jumpstart for the year ahead. As one team member said at the end of the makeathon: “This only took 48 hours. Can we make time for this kind of play in all of our sprints?”
