Session Title
Brainstorming Alongside Clients
Presenter
David Sherwin, frog design
Session Type: Activity
Interaction designers are often required to brainstorm great ideas individually or in teams to generate innovative user experience recommendations — that’s part of our job description. So what happens when the CEO of a company is sitting alongside you, participating in the process?
In this 40-minute activity, session participants will take part in solving a design problem in collaborative teams. Some of you will be role-playing clients, while other participants will be responsible for managing the outcome of each team’s brainstorm.
Along the way, things will go wrong for each team… so before our session ends, we’ll need to debrief and share our learnings as a group.
Don’t worry — you won’t be thrown cold into this activity! Before getting started, we’ll briefly cover best practices for a facilitated brainstorming session and provide you with a set of brainstorming methods that can be road-tested through the session.
This activity should be useful for everyone from newly minted interaction designers to those who are seeking to explore alternative methods of facilitating a collaborative client brainstorm.
Biography
David Sherwin is Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Seattle, Washington. He is author of a forthcoming book on creating better design ideas faster (due November 2010 from HOW Design Press), has recently written essays for A List Apart and Designer’s Review of Books, and maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design at http://changeorder.typepad.com.
One Comment
I think it’s a good idea to practice brainstorming, but I think you could go further with this.
I would like to see this description with more concrete examples of the activity goal.
(i.e. Participants will walk away with a list of techniques that provide a structure for approaching client brainstorming.)