Here, I’ve provided two examples of workshop creation, facilitation and synthesis. The first workshop was conducted as part of a team of students auditing our program’s communications platforms and involved stakeholders within and outside the Strategic Design and Management program. The second workshop was conducted as part of my capstone thesis project with another student.
Strategic Design and Management Communications Workshop
As part of a team, I created, facilitated and synthesized a Communications Workshop for the Strategic Design and Management (SDM) program in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design in New York City. The team is made up of three second year students in the SDM program. Over the course of the Fall 2020 semester, the SDM leadership and some students from the program have been working together to improve SDM’s communication, build on SDM’s digital and design community presence and foster an even more active program community. This workshop is one part of the initiative and focused on SDM’s digital communications presence. We invited representatives from the major stakeholder groups, including first and second year students, faculty and institutional marketing.
Our workshop goals were:
To understand how to best represent the program from a digital stand-point
To understand the needs of the various stakeholder groups
To generate ideas for digital engagement and content
The workshop consisted of a warm up exercise, an exercise to identify stakeholder information needs, breakout sessions for ideation and a sharing and feedback session. We synthesized the research and created a summary presentation for leadership that includes the overall insights. We learned what stakeholders consider to be the themes and applications of SDM, key expectations from the program, stakeholder communication needs and we developed a few solutions to address those needs. We recommended using the SDM blog as a key communication hub with several suggestions to implement in the next few months and 2021 year. The impact of this workshop will be to improve program presentation, communication and public image of the program if the insights and ideas are implemented. A sample of findings from the program overview warm up exercise are included below.
In answering the question, “What does Strategic Design and Management mean to you?”, stakeholders indicated three key themes, two areas of design application and two different examples of how design manifests.
In answering the question, “What are your expectations or benefits from this program?”, stakeholders indicated expectations around building professional networks and community, as well as producing expert thought leaders and entrepreneurs.
Concept Testing and Development Workshop
As part of a team, I created, facilitated and synthesized a workshop for my thesis as part of my masters program. Over the course of the Fall 2020 semester, another student and I have been researching the relationship between personal values and capitalism. After completing interviews, sending out a cultural probe and synthesizing our learnings, we developed a design concept. As part of furthering the design concept, this workshop helped us to test beginning ideas around a skills-based value exchange that operates as a trade and barter system.
Our concept vision is to create an exchange system based on a trade and barter infrastructure that provides value and can address the financial, safety and emotional needs of essential works and the unemployed who are suffering in industries that lack resilience.
We invited a diverse group of people with different ages, genders, races, family demographics, work experience and current employment status.
Our workshop goals were to determine:
What things can create value and be exchanged
How people would assign value to those things
Do any power plays determine the outcome?
How is an equal exchange determined?
How can we create a trusted system of exchange?
What are peoples concerns?
Would they use something like this?
The workshop consisted of four sections, which are outlined below.
Activity One
We created a scenario in which our participants could image themselves living in a community that operates on a trade and barter system. We asked participants to list skills they have that they think they could contribute to the community in some way. In the middle of this activity, we then asked participants to think about activity that others have asked them to do or help with to keep the scope of ideas broad and unique.'
Activity Two
In breakout rooms, we assigned the roles of Person A and Person B and had each team discuss how they would create a transaction between each others lists of skills using a helpful pair chart.
Activity Three
We brought each team back into the main room for a debrief of Activity 2 to answer the following questions:
How did you determine the value exchange (what is equal to what)
Do you feel like you got a fair outcome?
Was this a haggle situation?
Use a few single words to describe how you felt before and after your transaction
Who took the lead in the discussion?
Did you trust your partner?
Activity Four
For our last activity, we held an open discussion for participants to talk about what needs they thought a trade and barter system could apply to, their main concerns with a bartering system and areas that will require more exploration.
Outcomes
This workshop helped us learn the following insights about the most basic form of our concept:
The most frequent categories for exchange include: emotional support, teaching, goods and skills that they don't personally have
Services and skills, specifically professional, are deemed more valuable for exchange
Users felt that they could agree upon something together and work out how long the transaction would last together until each task was complete
People had to determine a unit of measure before proceeding
Partners trusted each other but may not outside a workshop; building trust is key
Excitement for concept, particularly around helping during unemployment