Iteration two - Workshop

The touch project are moving forward again, tomorrow i will conduct a three hour workshop with Marianne, Martin, Ingrid and Alice. This will actually be the first workshop i facilitate for one of my projects, and that makes it exiting. The last few days has been all about preparing for the workshop and we have had several lectures and practice in topics on how to conduct them. I hope the preparation has been good enough to make it a useful workshop.


Workshop planning
Myself and Gunnar had a workshop on the workshop to try to define more precicly the problems we wanted to shine a light on. It was quite useful.



Schedule
To get my participants tuned into workshop at an early stage they are required to bring with them one everyday object that is not related to school and that is not the mobile phone. I will put up a lot of paper on the wall as i find standing discussion, with paper to draw and write on, to be very productive. Something edible and drinkable will also be present.
1st. Hour (Starting 0900)
•"Press conference" - Introduction to my problem by interviewing the chosen objects from everyone on what their (the object) last 24 hours were like. Answered of course by the objects owners (10 minutes)
• Presentation of the problem definition to be used as the guide for the workshop: "How can we reveal the objects secret social network?" This might be confusing, but we will work under the assumption that objects can talk to each other and behave more or less human.
• Then we assosiate on the challenge by using single words that we put on the wall with post-its.
• The words are sorted into 6 categories that together contain all the words.
• To get something useful out of the words we select words we find interesting under each category, and rewrite those into complete and understandable ideas on the wall.

2nd. Hour
• New angle of attac: Using "creative cards" and other tools to force different contexts onto the problem and see how they play out. We do this in plenum in the group and hopefully this will yield a diversity of ideas
• Using criterias such as: Must use RFID, Has an appropriate scope, the ideas will be selected or slaughtered to narrow things down. To get even a narrower selection we will try to defend our personal favorites and have a vote on the remaining ideas.

3rd. Hour
• Since all the participants in the workshop are designers working on similar problems we will have an discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of the findings in the workshop. Also we will do a SWOT analysis on the problem definition and try to make a roadmap for further work.

This schedule follows partly methods learned, but also address more spesific issues that i need help with to gain momentum with my task.


The markers are in the air!

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