🔥 Design Kit Travel Pack Review
A little bit of IDEO in your pocket.
🤔 What’s in the deck?
What you’ll find in this card travel pack.
→ 3 Sections of Cards
1️⃣ Build Empathy — cards focused on understanding needs and challenges as an initial step of design thinking.
2️⃣ Unleash Your Creativity — activities to help you get out of your comfort zone and stretch that thinking!
3️⃣ Get Your Hands Dirty — approaches to experimentation and prototyping.
→ For each section of cards, there’s a little chart that identifies the card’s characteristics as Easy to Do, Great Warm-Up, Inspiration Driven, or Output Driven — super helpful if you’re looking to grab a certain kind of activity quickly!
→ Each card also has a suggested time for the activity on the front of the card at the top. This is great to help you decide if you want to use it as is, create a mini version, or pop it right into a workshop you already have time-boxed.
💡What I think.
My overall thoughts about the quality, content, themes, and more.
→ High-quality deck with sturdy cards. They are paper (but thick card stock), so probably don’t get them wet.
→ The box has a lovely soft matte finish.
→ The amount of thought put into the details of each of the cards is fantastic. They are not overly wordy but give you what you need. You get a description, steps, examples, and even timing.
😍 My fav cards.
The cards that stood out to me!
1️⃣ Build Empathy Cards
‘Rejection Therapy’ —a unique activity that helps you observe how it feels to walk in the unknown. It enables you to embrace the scary feeling of trying something new. How? Brainstorm scenarios where you would be told “no.” Then actually, make those scenarios real and observe what happens.
‘I Notice, I Wonder’ — a way to channel your observation and intuition. You might observe others and note details like how people interact, how their faces or even body movements look, or even environmental things happening around them.
2️⃣ Unleash Creativity Cards
‘Bad Idea Brainstorm’ — helps people break out of paralysis when coming up with ideas. This activity starts everyone off by sharing all the worst ideas to get unstuck.
‘Making Lemonade’— using the power of positive thinking, this activity helps unlock creative ideas as a warm-up leading into a workshop. Start with catastrophic scenarios and then start to reframe positively.
3️⃣ Get Your Hands Dirty Cards
‘Six in Sixty’— I love this one! It’s all about building quickly and iterating. Build your prototype. Here’s the catch make it scrappy; seriously, do it in 10 minutes. After it’s complete, test it out, and make note of anything you want to change. Then build it again — in another 10 minutes. Do this six times, and then reflect. What’s incredible about this is you can do it individually or in a group.
👩💻 How do I use this as a facilitator?
Let’s learn how to put these cards into action.
Ice Melters — with a warm-up category here, this one’s a no-brainer, grab a card marked as a warm-up and use it as-is or create a variation.
Design Sprints — you can use a mixture of these cards from each section to create an entire design sprint that takes your participants from understanding to prototyping.
Inspiration for Individual Activities — there’s so many great activity starters here you can really fit into any workshop as long as the concept follows your desired outcomes. Play with it, make them your own.
