Session Title
Let’s interact: collaborative team games
Presenter
Johanna Kollmann
Session Type: Activity
UX is a collaborative profession. Design and project teams bring together a variety of individuals and skills. Especially in multi-disciplinary teams, and in agile contexts, aligning a team around a shared vision, effective collaboration and constructive reflection sessions become more and more important. Soft skills matter more than ever.
This activity will introduce how collaborative games can be used to facilitate team building and reflection. Attendees will play two games that enhance a team’s creativity and problem-solving skills. We will discuss how UX practitioners managing a team can use games in team building workshops, which insights they can gain, and how reflecting on the experienced interactions enables team members to resolve conflicts.
Biography
Johanna Kollmann started her career in User Experience at Siemens in 2004 and has since gained experience in both in-house and agency-side roles. After working at London-based consultancy Flow Interactive, she is now a User Experience Manager at Vodafone. Her background is in Information Design (FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences Graz) and HCI (University College London).
Johanna’s interest in group dynamics and games originates in her volunteer work. She has ten years experience in pedagogics and coaching and has completed trainings in adventure education.
Johanna is a committee member of the UPA’s UK chapter, recently organised UXCamp London and presented her thoughts on Agile and UX at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago.
5 Comments
The reason why games work so well as brainstorming and team building tools is it adds that sense of fun to our everyday work. The more fun we have doing our work, the more creative and innovative our work can be. Can’t wait to see how this session might help instruct others on how to properly do this.
Thank you for your comment, Brad. Games can highlight implicit issues, such as conflicts within the team or different roles people take on. Hence they can be a powerful tool to trigger reflection and conversation. A facilitator needs to be aware of these issues. How to deal with conflicts and insights that arise from team activities will be a main focus of the workshop. Games are fun – as long as you know how to play.
Couldn’t agree more Johanna. Games seem to be a a largely un-tapped resource for the a lot of UX-ers. I’d be really interested in participating in this session.
Making workshops and teams work better together – and more importantly, quickly given the time we sometime have – would be very worthwhile.
Best of luck running the session. I’d love to see a presentation/video after the event to see how it went [I'll not be able to make the conference].
Johanna, this sounds like a fun and educational activity.
I’ve participated in collaborative games at the Canux workshop, led by the Banff Centre Leadership team. The consensus at the end of the process was that while the games were very useful in uncovering insights in a conference environment, attempting these activities in most corporate environments would be extremely challenging at best.
What kinds of games do you propose? Are they borrowed from other disciplines or are they games of your own design?