Last week we hosted the first Ideas Factory workshop at HighWire. Some of my colleagues have already written about what happened on the day and some of the outcomes that we had. I also want to reflect on our experience, but I would like to look back to the planning aspects of the workshop and what we have learned from it.

We were given a week to organise the workshop and the advice from our tutor was to think of the planning of the workshop in terms of experience and interaction design. In practical terms, it meant the emphasis of our planning was on the activities that people would be engaging in during the day, how the activities could be linked to each other and also the atmosphere and mood that would persuade and motivate people to be involved and take part.

We started by trying to decide what we wanted to achieve from the day as well as what each participant could take away that would inspire them to engage in our project. As we were still in the early stages of the research, having a clear idea of outcomes were difficult and perhaps, counter-productive. The project is in a divergent phase where we were trying to identify themes, areas and context of the research as well as define the research questions we will be answering through our project. Our objectives with the workshop were to gain insight and ideas, introduce the project to an audience of possible collaborators and start establishing working relationships for the next stages of the project. Also, we wanted it to be a day when we and our guests had some fun.

What followed was an exercise in how far we could stretch our imagination. We discussed and imagined what the liked the activities to be. When ideas first appeared they were vague, but as we discussed we were able to develop a very detailed picture of the event and including even how things should be positioned in the room so activities would flow from one to the other. We didn’t focus on content and we hoped that the ideas that would emerge would be unexpected, and in order for that to happen we had to imagine how to create situations that allowed for new modes of thinking and new connections to be made. I was surprised by how the experience design approach allowed us to get to the minimal details in planning how the day was going to develop. The difference from my previous experiences in organising events was on focusing on the interactions and activities rather than on the resources (such as materials, time and location). Of course we had to think of the resources eventually, but making the decisions of what we needed was simple once we had a vision and a feel of what the workshop was about.

Much of the thinking that we employed in the planning of the workshop reminded me of the article ‘Incomplete by Design or Designing for Incompleteness’ (Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008). It is a way of designing that breaks with the problem-solving approach that has been associated with design for a long time. What we designed was not a finished product or a solution. It was something that only ‘took shape’ and only existed while people are interacting with it. What we designed was a way for people to interact. At times I felt like we were creating a theatre performance, were we gathered the actors, provided them props and scenery, but not a script. The juicy bit we were interested on was what the participants would make of it.

In hindsight, tackling the workshop as an experience design project meant to design the structure of the activities and the system that need to be in place for people to get the most out of the day, but not the outcomes. That was the biggest challenge of this event: finding the right balance of control. As a research project we wanted to find out things that we didn’t already know. The risk of planning the activities too closely was that we could end up designing the results. It was important to be in control of the situation as they evolved during the day, planning every minute and interaction and keeping track of time but not to control the participants. By allowing freedom to participants to get the best outcomes for our project, we were able to harvest unexpected new ideas that we will now see develop in the next stages of our research project.

Garud, R., Jain, S., & Tuertscher, P. (2008). Incomplete by Design and Desiging for Incompleteness. Organizational Studies , 351-371.