John Gurtz > Portfolio > Design Studio
Design Studio
A brainstorming and collaboration method I have used frequently is the design studio. It is a 1-3 hour session of a diverse group of people. It starts with summarizing a problem and agreeing on a goal. Then the group brainstorms, individually, ways to solve the problem. These ideas are shared and then another round of brainstorming and sharing. Participants are encouraged to take ideas from one another and make them their own.
Example: Permission Stagging
Image a folder of files on your computer or a shared drived with colleauges. These systems can often have security set up so certain people can access certain files and folders. An employer I worked had this a feature in its document repository software. The security feature was called permissions and looked like this.
Design studios help you think differently
This design was used multiple times for an ehancement that allowed users to stage or preview the permission settings. But design after redesign, users rejected the concept. I was asked to get the design thinking out of this model and aligned with users' mental model. I facilitated a design studio doing exactly this.
Instead of focusing on staging permissions, I had the group think about an unrelated, but similar problems. First, I had the group sketch out a system for assigning and tracking who was responsible for completing chores and on which day of the week for a family of five. Second, I had the group sketch out a system for tracking which of the four activities children were allowed to take part in and whether or not a specific child had to be supervised during the activity, at a day care center. Why did I do this? The design thinking was stuck in a bad model. But forcing the group to think about something different, the design thinking became different.
Output vs Input
The very first thing I noticed in people's sketches was their ideas were working spaces. They were boards that were meant to be edited and manipulated. The hands had to be used. They were something that required input.
When compared to the permission stagging models we had been stuck with, they did not feel like working spaces. They felt like an output of data. And that was what did not work with that model. It was a good output space that visually represented settings. But it was a perceivable input space for managing the settings.
The next two sketches from the session represent the input versus output destinction. On the left is someone's messy workspace where they tried to organize the paramenters. On the right is someone's clean output once they knew how to organize and present their parameters.
With this revelation, I mocked up some ideas for doing permission stagging differently. This is THE example I used when discussing the benefits of a design studio: brainstorming with a diverse group of people around a well articulated problem.
