I was invited by the organising team of the Society for Technical Communication’s India chapter conference to introduce the concepts of Design thinking to the participants.
We did some brainstorming and decided that instead of giving a lecture for an hour about design thinking and walk off, it would be better if we can find some additional time and get the participants to experience Design thinking methodology by using the process to attempt to solve something that everyone of them are currently facing.
I got about 150 mins at the conference to deliver this experience. After a lot of deliberation and ideation, we decided to use the process and explore if we can make documentation fun.
The idea was to get them an experience which is as close to reality as possible of using the Design thinking methodology, in the time and space that we were allotted.
So, there were no post-it notes, no charts, no empathy maps or customer journey maps, yet, the participants were able to experience and learn about Design thinking. This itself was a challenge to deliver a workshop with about 11 teams of 6 people, with no additional facilitators and in a space that i had so far never used for running a Design thinking workshop.
Despite all these limitations, the teams did really well to not only experience and learn but also come up with some fun and interesting ways to make documentation fun (for themselves and also for those who they create the documentation for).
The teams were not only able to understand the problem better and come up with some ideas but were also able to create and share prototypes for feedback. With more time and iterations, I am confident that the teams would have been able to come up with some very convincing and potentially great ideas to make documentation fun.
Here is the recording of the experience we delivered for the participants.
The second part of the session is here:
If you are new to Design thinking and would like to get to know about the process, these videos can prove to be a good starting place.
