Exploring Design Drinking
Making Design Thinking fun again.
My name is Marc and I‘m a workaholic.
So when Joan suggested to Christian and me to perform a design hackathon I said “yes”. The idea was simple, instead of partying on Friday, run a 12-hour design workshop with a party mood. Pick one crazy idea at 6:00 PM, run a design sprint, and come up with a detailed and tested product at 6:00 AM.
We all work as designers and we wanted to do something together that doesn’t seem like daily work. Because when we had the best ideas, it was when we shared an after-work beer.
We wanted to shake design thinking turning an ideation workshop into a house party.
Spoiler: We failed.
The Design Drinking approach
To ensure it does not feel like office work, we came upon this cheerful agenda and we called it “Design Drinking”:
Basically, each stage constrains one day of the Design Sprint process adding a party game attitude:
MEASURE / 06:00 PM — 08:00 PM
Participants must pitch their ideas and measure their goals. As soon as it’s done, we would order a few pizzas and we should have decided the focus of the sprint before the delivery is done. If not, the food will be cold.
SHAKE / 08:00 PM — 11:00 PM
We will run a few brainstormings to shake our minds and generate concept solutions. Instead of a timmer, we will play music, and when the track ends the Crazy 8's must be filled. If someone doesn’t accomplish it drinks a shot for each empty frame.
STRAIN / 11:00 PM — 01:00 AM
At this point, no one will be in the mood of sitting or writing post its. We need to drive this euphoria into something creative. That’s why we will evaluate our ideas by doing a role-play and giving a toast to each identified pain. At the end of the performance, we will have strained the most promising concept direction.
SHAPE / 01:00 AM — 04:00 AM
This is the most difficult part. The team must cold down and shape the selected idea as a testable prototype. Let’s avoid using computers and build something with all the garbage generated during the party.
SIP / 04:00 AM — 06:00 AM
It’s time to leave the apartment and expose our product to a walk of shame. We will carry out a guerrilla test with the people who leave the bars to collect user feedback. Because a drunk man tells no lies.
In addition, we established some rules to reinforce the party atmosphere: no chairs or tables and always with the music on.
Why we failed
Against all odds, the problem was neither alcohol nor fatigue, it was our setup. We were too confident about our experience running design sprints so we did not pay attention to some basic aspects for its success:
Overlapped disciplines
To come up with a solid outcome you must assemble a multidisciplinary team. The team consisted of a service designer and two product designers… there is a lack of diversity for sure.
Tiny team
Nobody will call a meeting of just three guys a party. Discussions were always between the same people and there was no way to split the team to explore in parallel different concept directions.
Reign of chaos
It became impossible to follow our agenda without someone looking beyond the design project. A moderator to control the timings and to cut endless discussions was mandatory.
Tailored challenge
We chose the challenge that best suited the sprint settings and not the most interesting one. We were always making decisions based on what works best for the setup and not what is most interesting to explore.
Afraid of working on something too big, we ended up designing something too boring.
So at 4:00 AM we decided to call the night (actually already the day) before even started Shape and Sip stages. We were sad but satisfied, we did not discover a new unicorn but we tested the approach and it was promising.
What will we do now
What we will do after this first trial is polishing the formula. We strongly believe that this approach may work as an alternative to daily work.
From the beginning, our main goal was to learn from other people by doing something together. So, to keep it fresh, we will always invite two guest stars to join us:
A problem Owner: A participant who comes already with a challenge to face.
A random Creative: Someone with a totally different background who may help us to look to the problem from another angle and shape the prototype.
We will assemble a team of 4 participants: 50% fellas, 50% newcomers. In addition, one of us will be in charge of the workshop time control to guarantee an accomplishment of the goals.
So if you are a “problem owner” or a “random creative” who wants to participate in one of our Design Drinking parties contact Joan.
He is building @fem.coliving, a rural ideation space where run our workshops without bothering the neighbors!
Stay tuned!
