Week 7: Facilitating Generative Workshops

This week we hosted and facilitated two generative workshops with Carnegie Mellon food service employees, as well as young consumers between the ages of 19–23. Through these 1-hour sessions, our goal was three-fold. First, we wanted to understand our users’ mental models of 3 stakeholders: customers, employees and managers. Second, we wanted our users to reflect on their community values and constructs. Third, we wanted to see how our users imagined a more perfect future in the context of work and community.

To uncover these insights, we designed 3 activities.

Activity 1: The Work Triangle

1. Assume your role in this context: employee, manager or customer

2. Map images to motivations and challenges of the three stakeholders

3. Draw lines to show affinities and conflicts between stakeholders.

Activity 2: Community Reflection

1. Consider employees, managers, and consumers (The Work Triangle) as your community.

2. Answer 4 questions about what you offer and receive from the community now, and what you wish for in the future.

Activity 3: Imaging an Ideal Future

1. Choose one response to: ‘What do you wish your community did for you?’ and write on a grey card.

2. Pick a future card and a medium card to imagine a desired future.

3. Draw or write your idea.

Design Materials for the Workshop

For each of these activities, we gathered and designed a variety of materials that helped our participants, many of whom are unfamiliar with the design process, more easily contribute and communicate their stories. To make people feel comfortable, we made use of very familiar materials such as markers, paper and online images.

We also took into consideration the cohesion of all three activities as a whole. Although our participants were involved in three different activities, it was important they could make connections between them. To facilitate that, we used the same colors across all activities. Each activity also built upon the previous one in some way.

Below is a closer look at the materials we used to conduct each of the activities.

Now that we’ve completed our workshops and gathered data from more than 14 participants, we will spend the next few days synthesizing. We intend to use methods such as 2x2s, content analysis, and affinity mapping to better understand these qualitative insights.