Phase 3 - Week Ten
Week Ten
Focus for this week:
The focus for this week is to draft out emails and what I want to write on different ones - List the people that I want to get in contact with as well as planning out a workshop.
Drafting out emails
I ended up drafting 3 different emails, one that would go to the council members, one to organisation and one that would go to the artists themselves. None of them differed with the content but just differed what i was asking them to provide for me:
List of people that I need to contact:
Using the previous spread sheets, I listed and contacted the following email addresses using the above email templates, then it was all about the waiting game and seeing if people were going to email back to me. Some of them didn’t have email addresses, so were contacted on their work instagram accounts. I also sent all the emails from my university email address.
Plan of action - Workshop
So whilst I waited for the contacts to get back to me, I decided to start planning workshop that I wanted to make sure that I ran within the module:
I started researching different ways of running workshops, I found this youtube video on how to run a design thinking workshop by Career Foundry:
From the video I have listed the things that I need to do in order to run a workshop:
Set Objectives
Find a space for the workshop
The agenda - don’t over fill it
Each agenda item is based on activity - How long each
Think about the Digital materials that you are using
Physical materials you want to provide( Post it notes, Markers, Whiteboard)
How to conduct the workshop:
Introduction
Consent forms for the workshop
Ice breaker activity - Collaborative positive workshop enviroment
Shoes of the User - Get their mindset the same as the user
Interview each other
Categorise whats being said
Saying thinking doing feeling - Empathy Mapping
Define
Point of View statement
Ideation Phase
Sketching
Prototype Phase
Testing phase - What works and what doesn’t work
I thought this video was great at walking through how to plan and conduct a design workshop, I didn’t want to go and plan the workshop straight away because I want to wait and see the response from the emails and how many people I would have until i created a workshop.
I also read a Medium article on creating a workshop and the benefits of running a workshop:
https://uxplanet.org/how-to-run-an-effective-ideation-workshop-a-step-by-step-guide-d520e41b1b96
Within the article is said the following:
Invite the right people ( 8-10 people)
Designate a Facilitator
They will do the following:
A short opening statement.
A clear itinerary with timings: e.g. introduction (2 mins), ice-breaker activity (5 mins), framing the problem (2 mins), ideation technique 1 (10 mins), ideation technique 2 (10 mins), and so on.
A stopwatch to time each activity.
Pen and paper for making notes and recording ideas
Choose a suitable location
Prepare a list of how might we questions to get everyone thinking.
Break the ice
Ideation techniques
Ideas and gather next steps
This article filled in some of the grey areas from the video but with them combined I think I now know the phases of how I would want to run the workshop when it came down to it.
Weekly Summary:
The majority of this week was spent making emails and then finding the people that I wanted to send them too and sending them out. This took some time as the many different organisations and different areas within Southampton of people that I wanted to contact. I also wanted to try and contact as many people as I could, as I knew that initially people probably won’t respond. I have a feeling that when I get the first interview this will be a domino effect for contacting other people and other organisations from referring people by mouth. It was also a good use of time to plan a workshop for the future and find out how to run one as this will gave me the basis of how one runs.
Resources:
Career Foundry (2020). How To Run A Design Thinking Workshop. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5agx1J9dJQ.
uxplanet.org (2019). How To Run An Effective Ideation Workshop: A Step-By-Step Guide. [online] Medium. Available at: https://uxplanet.org/how-to-run-an-effective-ideation-workshop-a-step-by-step-guide-d520e41b1b96.
Things to remember:
Personal action plan created in relation to your studio project and report, responding to feedback from the formative panel / student review of your case study presentations in Week 8.
Design development captured, edited and presented in a format of your choice, as a clear narrative of your project development, to be published via your research journal (blog) and on the Ideas Wall.
Critical Report draft development, to be published via your research journal (blog), with a link to it on the Ideas Wall.
All outputs to be clearly documented on your blogs, with evidence of active engagement with the Ideas Wall.