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Graphic Jam sparks high-school imaginations

Graphic Jam!

Katie Koch of Project: Interaction is Gamestorming with high-school students. Here’s an excerpt from her blog post where she explains how she used Graphic Jam (page 96) to get students thinking visually and to get their creative juices flowing:

Looking for a fun way to brainstorm, we decided to adapt a game called Graphic Jam, from the book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. The game challenges participants to visualize words that often seem too abstract to imagine in a tangible way. Participants are given two minutes to sketch as many ideas as they can to represent the chosen word.

We thought this would be a great assignment for our class for a few reasons. Many of our girls keep saying to us that they’re not any good at drawing, and we are determined to break that mindset and get them comfortable with thinking visually. And, we want them to know that having lots of ideas is critical to finding the right idea. We also wanted them to know that brainstorming can be more alive than just writing words on paper.

The Graphic Jam was a huge success! Each word generated tons of tiny sketches. When time was up and the alarm rang, the girls rushed out of their seats to post their sketches to the chalkboard, with over half the group eagerly volunteer to explain their sketches in front of the class.

You can read the full post here.

Project:Interaction is a ten-week after-school program that teaches high-schoolers how they can use design to help improve their communities. They could use your help to buy materials for their classes. If you like what they’re doing please consider helping them with their Kickstarter campaign: They have five days left and need another $2,000 or so to reach their $7,500 goal, even after the funds were taken out of the line of credit provided by Sambla Norway’s forbrukslån financial initiative. It’s a great program. Why not lend a hand?

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Lo Tech Social Network at TEDx Austin

As many of you know, TEDx events have sprung up all over the world. Planning the bigger events takes a lot of time and effort from volunteers who are serious about “ideas worth spreading.” I’m one of those volunteers, having been on the production team for TEDx Austin since its inception. The team was very supportive of our book, Gamestorming, when it was released and we used the next group meeting as an opportunity to demonstrate the value of the visual-thinking activities within. What you see above is an artifact from a recent meeting with some of the best design, marketing and UX firms in Austin. It was a creative brainstorm designed to put the “hive mind” together to see how we can make the 2011 event better and bolder than last year’s (which was very well done, in large part to Nancy Giordano‘s solid mind and infectious enthusiasm). I’d love to be able to show the other visual artifacts from the meeting, alas, that content is intended to be a surprise for the audience.

Some tips for running the Lo Tech Social Network game (on p. 105 of the book): This game is an opener and it really contributes to warming up groups that otherwise may be slow to wake up or timid about contributing, particularly if they’re in a group of their professional peers. (Note: If the people are strangers who have never heard of each other, this game won’t work. At least 1/2 of the participants need to have some knowledge of the others.) Position your white space by a food-and-drink area so the participants can loiter and make connections while they (sometimes awkwardly) stand around before the meeting begins. You can have written instructions on a flip chart next to the space they’re playing in, but it’s also good to have a visual example already in the white space (at least two sticky notes connected by a line that says how the people are connected) and you’ll find that people deduce what to do. And of course you can have a facilitator placed near the area to give people the rules of the game and supply them with markers and sticky notes. Lo Tech Social Network gets fun fast and it alleviates the desire to run the old “My-name-is _______ and-one-thing-people-don’t-know-about-me-is _______” snoozer. This is a faster way to accomplish the same goal and to actually show how small the world can be. And if you want to make the game less formal, start off the visual example by writing a comment like, “we have the same taste in women” or “we went to the same nudist colony.” If you’ve got a tight-knit group already, let them be goofy. It makes it a funnier experience.

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American Marketing Association interviews Dave Gray about Gamestorming

Summary: According to Dave Gray in his new book, Gamestorming, playing with office supplies is not a waste of time. Whipping out a stack of post-its in a meeting and jotting down notes or sketching ideas is actually helpful; otherwise all those ideas have to stay inside your head, getting lost and confused. Writing out ideas, moving them around like pieces in a game, and collaborating with others makes for faster meetings and more creativity. Every company needs those creative ideas to reach the top even just stay there.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Coriolis Effect

corporate team building

Materials:

  • One plastic pipe per person
  • One ball (bouncy ball, marble, wooden ball) per team
  • One team handout per team
  • One timer per group, one person on each time needs a timer function on their watch or a timer function on their cell phones (I have found that all groups have at least one person with a stop watch function on their cell phones)

Team Size:

4-15 people per/team

Objective:

Offers insights into the needs that different team members have for information and detail, how people like to work in either a structured or unstructured approach to problem solving and change, and how quickly and slowly people are willing to move ahead with a plan based on how much they know and understand about the solution.

Preparation:

Each team of 4-6 people will need sufficient space to spread and work independently of the other groups, if it is a nice day I always recommend going outside.

When the teams are established hand each team member one pipe per person and one to three balls per team, additionally hand each team one to two team handout sheets.

Instructions and Facilitator Script:

It is all on the team handouts.

Ensure that each team has a team handout – inform each group that they will have 30 minutes to develop the fastest and most efficient process to reach customer satisfaction and project completion. Following the 30 minutes of project time, you will ask the groups to review and answer the team processing questions on the back of the handout.

If the teams ask you (the facilitator) for clarification be a stickler and say, “everything you need to know is on the team handout; as long as you are following the guidelines set by the handout you are being successful.” This will annoy some people, just stick to the script.

Leadership Training Buffalo NY Univ. at Buffalo Womens Softball - Team Building Buffalo, NY

Coriolis Affect Team Handout.

Equipment: One team sheet, one gutter for each person on your team, 3 bouncy balls, one stopwatch, and a pen

(Do you have everything? Does it work?)

Time: You will have 25 minutes of project time, during the 25 minutes you may make as few and as many attempts as your team wishes.

Directions: Make a human circle then give each person a gutter (one gutter per person).

Hand the bouncy balls to the tallest person in the circle.

Assign a timer for the attempts – the timer is allowed to participate in the activity.

You are ready to begin.

Objective: Move one bouncy ball around the circle using only the gutters and following the guidelines, as quickly as possible.

Guidelines:

  • Starting with the tallest person use the gutters (and only the gutters) to transport one bouncy ball to the person to their left then all the way around and back to the tallest person.
  • Try to send the ball through the process as fast as you can, beginning and ending in the tallest persons gutter, here are the constraints;
  • No one’s gutter can be skipped, the ball must pass through all team members gutters
  • Gutters cannot touch each other
  • Gutter per person method – Your own pinkies must be touching each other all the time.
  • You cannot touch any other gutters besides your own
  • People cannot touch the ball as it travels from beginning through the process and back to the beginning.
  • If the ball falls from the gutter, the process must be restarted.

Coriolis Affect Team Processing Questions:

Directions: Choose a volunteer willing to read the questions and write some responses. Discuss as many of these questions as you can with your group in the time allowed. Jot down key responses in the margins. Be honest with yourself and others. Honesty will bring out understanding. Understanding will lead to learning.

Looking back on the activity, consider the idea of Communication.

1. Determine what types of communication took place during the activity.

2. In each of your opinions, which was the most powerful form of communication during the activity? What made them powerful?

3. What were some successful communication moments?

4. At what points were you having difficulty communicating?

5. What might each of you want to remember about communication?

Consider who is on the team & their talents…

1. What were some of the ideas that were generated?

2. How receptive was the group to new and different ideas?

3. How did you add structure to the ideas?

4. What were some of the roles that were proposed for people in this project?

5. Which ideas were seen as unrealistic / realistic? what made those ideas unrealistic / realistic?

6. Describe how the plan was developed and evaluated?

7. Explain the action steps of the project. Describe the results and outcomes of the action steps.

8. How do you feel about what was done? ideas for improvement?

9. What was the key moment in the teams’ success? where did the ideas come from? who was the ideas champions?

10. Where do you feel were the gaps in this project? how did or did you not work to fill those gaps?

If you have Time…

1. How mindful were you of your preferred team role?

2. Describe how that impacted your part in the project.

Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning an experiential based consulting, facilitation, training and coaching organization. Leading to successful results in retention of staff talent, increased satisfaction with work, increased collaboration and information sharing within and between departments, increased accountability of success and failures, increased knowledge transfer, increased trust as well as speed of project completion and decision making of Leaders, Teams and Organizations.

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SXSW panel proposal for Gamestorming

We have proposed a panel at the SXSW Interactive conference on Gamestorming. Here’s the description:

Work is getting flatter. There’s no central server dishing out orders. It’s a peer-to-peer, co-evolving world. The team that flocks together, rocks together. The future of work is not about dull routine, it’s about being more human. It’s about curiosity, exploration, flexibility and imagination. Gamestorming is for people who want to design the future, to change the world, to make, break and innovate. It’s a kind of Jedi-judo for inventors, explorers and change agents who want to engage the swarm, surf the infosphere and fan the creative hive to an excited state. Gamestorming is a practice made of people, paper and passion. The enabling technologies are sticky notes, whiteboards, index cards, loose rules and fast action. Gamestorming is a mashup of game principles, game mechanics and work. It’s about weaving energy and fast-feedback loops into your work, into your meetings with co-workers, into your design and development activities. Gamestorming is the future of work. Our panel of Gamestorming Jedi will infect you with the Gamestorming virus, so you can carry it back with you and unleash the contagion to the other nodes in your network. There is no antidote.

SXSW selects panels based on votes and comments from people like you. So get on over there and vote!

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Party Invitations

This game is credited to Cyd Harrell and has been used by Bolt Peters in several client brainstorming meetings.

Objective of play: Improve the onboarding process of a product or service.

Number of players: 5-30
Duration of play: 30-60 minutes

How to play:

  1. Everyone is handed a piece of paper and a marker.
  2. Participants are asked to imagine that the product/service being designed is a party or event and to create an invitation.
  3. Invitations should be as detailed and realistic as possible — they might include an inviting statement (“Join us for…”), what to bring, what the host (company) will provide, time, dress code, directions, RSVP info, and any other information guests might need to enjoy the party. It could also be done in the form of a Who, What, Where, When, Why invitation.
  4. Participants are encouraged to refine their invitations in multiple iterations. Allow at least 10-15 minutes for invitation writing.
  5. Once everyone has completed their invitations, the facilitator calls for ideas on each element of an invitation in turn:
    • What did you call the party?
    • Did anybody have a dress code?
    • What did you say about refreshments?
    • What do guests need to bring?
    • What is the party actually for?
    • How will guests get there?
  6. Next, participants read through their invitations in turn. The facilitator takes notes and posts the themes on a white board.
  7. After everyone has presented, participants jointly narrow and refine the ideas, keeping in mind things like:
    • What metaphors have emerged? How might they contribute to ideas for the onboarding experience?
    • Which elements are crucial to the invitation?
    • Which ideas represent the right feel for the brand and offering?
  8. Finally, the facilitator engages the group in sketching or another idea generation process to implement the refined invitation as a draft of the onboarding process.
An example party invitation.

Strategy:
This is essentially a metaphor-generation game that allows participants to imagine how they want to engage their audience. Detail is good, and players who go whole-hog with imagining their party as anything from a white-tie gala to a potluck are likely to be successful as long as they carry it through. Interesting discussions will ensue when participants go for different versions — are we a come as you are party or do we have a festive dress code? Must you RSVP or can you just show up?

Why invitations?
At
Bolt Peters, we often think of successful technology products as being more than just friendly. They are literally inviting — asking their audience to use them, rewarding them when they do, and asking again for higher levels of use and engagement. When deploying a conversion funnel, especially for gradual engagement, an enticing and escalating invitation is a critical piece of the puzzle.

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Air Time Mastermind

Air Time Mastermind with Maverick Business Adventures members


Object of play:

Brainstorm multiple solution and answers to participants pressing problems…while feeling like a 7-year old again.

Number of players: 10-50

Duration of play: 30 minutes – 1.5 hours

How to play:

1.    Everyone is handed a piece of construction paper.
2.    At the top of one side, participants are asked to write their biggest, most pressing problem the group can assist with and then their name on the reverse side.
3.    Ask participants to be as specific as possible with the question. (i.e. “What low or no-cost ways can I increase referrals for my service business?”)
4.    Make sure participants leave enough space below their question for multiple answers.
5.    Have people start folding their paper airplane with the question ending up the inside of the folds.
6.    Recommend each person decorate their plane individually to be able to find it later on.
7.    Once everyone has completed their airplanes it’s time to fly! Have everyone stand up and toss their planes into the wild blue yonder!
8.    Each participant grabs an airplane that doesn’t belong to them and unfolds it.
9.    Next, participants read through the question inside the airplane and provide their best answer. Make sure participants place their name or initials (for smaller groups) next to their response.
10.    Allow 3 minutes for answers and then call time.
11.    Participants (hopefully) re-fold their paper airplane and re-launch them.
12.    The cycle repeats for as many rounds as time available or until someone pokes an eye out.
13.    If a participant gets the same airplane twice they should switch with a neighbor.
14.    At the end of the flying time – each participant retrieves their winged worksheet.
15.    Facilitator asks for volunteers or selects individuals to present questions that have universal appeal to the audience and start group discussion.
16.    (Optional) Silly prizes given for best flying plane, sorriest looking plane, best design, etc.

Strategy:
Questions dictate your answers and getting answers from an assortment from different people gives participants another vantage point to their ideal solution. Also, instead of a group setting, some quieter participants with good ideas are now ‘heard’ since they have introspective time to come up with responses. What’s more, since everyone has signed their name or initials to their answer, participants will naturally engage in private conversations later on.

Refinement:
You can customize the game based on a particular meeting theme. Recently for a Maverick World Cup adventure & business excursion, we used inflatable soccer balls and had participants tape index cards to the soccer ball before kicking them. We called the game “Kickin’ It!” (Like kicking their biggest business problem.)

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Video Card Family Game

Video capture

Object of Play:  Co-create products or services using design insights gained from collaborative analysis of key frames of peoples’ activities from video clips recorded during ethnographic field work.

 Number of Players: 6 – 12

 Duration of Play: 7 – 8 hours

Required Resources: The Video Card Family Game requires use of a video camera (perhaps a smartphone), video editing software, graphics software, desktop publishing software, index card printing stock paper, and a printer (preferably color).

 Preparing to Play: The Video Card Family Game is a research technique useful in promoting collaboration among design team members and people engaged in the front-end design process. It uses video recording as a visualization resource for ethnographic fieldwork, especially participant observation among stakeholders (typically a product innovation team) and people who will use the product or service. The preparation time depends on the nature of the project as well as the logistics of the field work.

Ethnographic field work, in the simplest terms, means going to where the people of interest gather to share in their experience and analyze it. Designers use participant observation to co-create insights for product and service design by experiencing the peoples’ activities involved, such as working in their own context, or staging an environment in which people perform the activities of interest using mock-ups or prototypes.

1. To prepare for the Video Card Family Game, the facilitator edits the video into segments of no more than two minutes each. The importance of participant observation comes into play during the selection of video segments. Participant observers select video segments using insights about what is significant that they gained during the field work.

Note: It is important to select video segments in which actions, rather than conversations, are primarily occurring. You want, predominantly, to see what people do rather than hear what they say they do. In other words, focus on video where people are involved in physical action.

2. Save each video segment with a unique file name.

 3. Select a key frame from each video segment and give it a unique identifier.

 4. Create a video card by copying the key frame for each segment and pasting it into two corresponding index cards in your stock paper template. Give both cards the same title. Number both cards with the same unique identifier. Leave a comment area either below, or beside, the picture depending on how you layout the index cards.

Note: The image from the key frame may need resizing in a graphics editor before pasting it onto the index card stock paper template. You paste the image on two index cards to produce duplicate video cards.

5. Print  the duplicate video cards and place each in a separate stack.

 6. Repeat steps 2-5 for each video segment.

Note: The number of video cards created from the two-minute segments provides a degree of objectivity in the selection process. Ideally, each game player receives a stack of 10 video cards.

How to Play:

 (Allocate one hour for Steps 1 – 5 of playing the game)

1. Explain the rules of the game by providing a synopsis of steps 2 – 10 in the game play.

2. Provide players with instructional guidance on the difference between observing action in video and interpreting action.

Note: Observations come from descriptions of who is engaged in the action, what they are doing, where they are doing it, when they do it, and how they do. Interpretations involve assertions about why particular people do what they do when and where they do it. At times though, how they do it applies to interpretation when it relates to why the action occurs.

3. Group the players into pairs and provide each group with duplicate stacks of video cards.

4. Play the video segments corresponding to each video card in the duplicate stacks provided to each pair of players.

Note: Instruct the game players in each group to review the video segments in their group but not to discuss them with their partner.

5. Ask players in each group to take observational notes regarding what happens in the video segment corresponding to a video card. The idea here is for each player to personalize their video cards through writing notes on them, making them tangible research artifacts to handle and use in design discussions.

(Allocate 30 minutes for Step 6)

6. Ask each pair of players to discuss what they saw in the video segments and arrange their video cards into “families” that share a theme, before placing them on a table. Any theme is appropriate as long as it makes sense for the design focus of the game.

(Allow 1 hour for Steps 7 – 8 )

7. Ask each player to choose a favorite “family” of video cards from those they identified with the other player in their group. Doing so makes that player responsible for relating the design focus to user input as exhibited in the resulting “family” of video cards.

8. Attach each favorite “family” of video cards to a poster and write a heading for the theme it represents. Organize the video segments corresponding to each “family” for easy review.

(Allow 3 – 4 hours for Step 9)

9. Bring all the players from all the pair groups back together with their posters. Ask each player to describe and show their favorite “family” of video cards and invite other players who think their video cards fit, or resemble, the theme to add them to that family.

Note: The game property of the play comes to bear at this step, since the idea of the game is to pass as many cards from your stack to others as possible. The player describing their favorite “family” attempts to avoid further additions to their theme by playing the relevant video segment and explaining why the proposal to add another video card does not fit. No single player has seen all the video segments. Therefore, accepting or rejecting a video card for each theme depends on all the players reviewing the video segment from which the video card proposed for addition is drawn.

 (Allow 1 hour for Step 10)

10.  Document the themes by having members of each group write a structured description using the following format:

  • Describe the theme
  • Describe why it belongs in the family you assigned it to
  •  Provide at least two examples
  • Describe the way the action occurs in context
  • Describe the way people employ the action in the context

Strategy

Video of people’s activity is one of the most challenging resources used in design research. Playing and replaying video segments for review is time consuming and, depending on the number of people involved and the type of activity recorded, difficult to distill into agreed upon insights. The Video Card Game’s design provides a collaborative structure for interaction between designers and users to co-create insights for product and service design from video sources.

When playing the Video Card Family Game, facilitators need to remember that, even though the video cards give the video a tangible mode of expression, the images remain on relatively small cards, whether on the surface of a table or attached to a poster on the wall. One can imagine an interactive wall display like Microsoft’s Surface that minimizes the legibility problem. Short of such a solution however it is important to keep in mind the logistical limitations imposed by rendering video representations of action onto video cards.

Provenance

The Video Card Family Game draws from the “Happy Families” children’s card game, a game in which players collect families of four cards as they ask one another in turn for cards of a particular archetype. The goal of “Happy Families” is to collect a family of four cards, forming a stack. Collecting the most stacks makes you the winner.

Werner Sperschneider, a user-centered designer, at the Danish industrial manufacturer, Danfoss A/S, created the initial version of the Video Card Game as a method for combining ethnographic and visual research methods using video.  Design researchers, Margot Brereton, Jared Donovan, Stephen Viller, at the University of Queensland, as well as Jacob Buur and Astrid Soendergaard, of  the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Aarhus, respectively, also provide case studies of its use.

The rendition of the game offered here refers to it as the Video Card Family Game for the explicit purpose of making it clear that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance is a key criteria in the gaming process for deciding to which themes a video card belongs.


Larry Irons is a Principal at Customer Clues, LLC. Larry practices Experience Design — translating strategic business goals, and the complex needs of people, into exceptional experiences for those who provide products and services, and those who consume them, whether the latter are customers, users, learners, or just plain people. He writes the blog, Skilful Minds, which blogs.com listed as one of the top ten Customer Experience blogs in 2009. Skilful Minds is also listed in the top 99 Workplace eLearning blogs by eLearning Technology.

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Mouse Traps to Explore Exceptions and Solutions

Mouse Traps break the worry cycle to develop new habits and behaviors

create-learning team building & leadership

Worry is something that we all of have. Worry stops us from;

  • Taking risks
  • Exploring the unknown
  • Gaining new knowledge
  • Changing
  • Listening
  • Making more money
  • Confronting team members who are not doing their work
  • Being happy and doing meaningful work

 

Worry follows a familiar pattern

Event (internal or external) –> Worry (Thoughts & Feelings) –> Worry—Physical (Stress reactions) –> Worry—Behavior (Checking & Avoiding) –> returning to Worry

This cycle is vicious. 

So how do mouse traps break this? A mouse trap has an external worry attached. Fears from getting injured, to rodent phobia etc…

Attaching and working through a Worry, creating familiarity with the worry, determining the exceptions to the worry and what solutions can happen, and the final step is attaching a solution that the person has to the mouse trap.

Here is how I generally sequence Breaking the Worry Cycle with Mouse traps.

  1. Explain the worry cycle
  2. Explore techniques to reduce worry i.e. behavior replacement, breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation.
  3. Illustrate how mouse traps work
  4. explore worries and individual worry of mouse traps
  5. Practice until familiar and have a working comfort with traps
  6. Explore when people felt comfort with the mouse trap, and how they increased their comfort.
  7. Explain about breaking the worry cycle. Looking for exceptions to the worry and facilitating a discussion about solutions finding. 
  8. Ask people to write a worry they have on the trap
  9. Ask people to write a solution or exception to the worry on a note card 
  10. Guide people though a visualization of worry reduction and techniques.
  11. Guide people through a visualization in feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, observing when the solution / exception is taking place.
  12. Interaction with mouse traps through Trust:Trap:Sequence
  13. Facilitate a discussion comparing and contrasting comfort levels and worry of mouse traps.
  14. People gain concrete and metaphorical skills in breaking the worry cycle to find solutions and exception with the mouse traps.

 

Mouse Traps and the Worry Cycle – good stuff. To discuss this further contact me

Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning an experiential based consulting, facilitation, training and coaching organization. Leading to successful results in retention of staff talent, increased satisfaction with work, increased collaboration and information sharing within and between departments, increased accountability of success and failures, increased knowledge transfer, increased trust as well as speed of project completion and decision making of Leaders, Teams and Organizations.