The Interaction Design Foundation takes us through three steps to facilitate design thinking and overcome obstacles to innovation within your team.

Design thinking is crucial to all business teams as it provides increased innovation, greater team cohesiveness, creative confidence and human-centred solutions. Difference is critical in this process, however, often team members may feel intimidated or confused by the chaotic and creative process that is design thinking.

The Interaction Design Foundation suggests three steps to remove any negative tension and facilitate this process:


Step 1: Explain the design thinking process
 
Use process diagrams, run through definitions for each of the stages, and explain the iterative nature of the process and the proven tools that are used throughout (user interviews, sketching etc).

Team members feel safer when they understand the background and structure of what they are doing. At Make Happy we follow this method of explanation when using Lego Serious Play (LSP) in workshops.

Step 2: Break the Ice

Icebreakers are essential when a team starts working on something new. We often encourage participants to build a lego duck at the start of an LSP workshop to break the ice and become comfortable with building lego. To learn more about this, click here.

This exercise fulfils the Interaction Design Foundations criteria of:

  • Ensuring icebreakers do not isolate team members.
  • Making team members confident and comfortable.
  • Removing the hierarchies.

Step 3: Encourage participants to tap into their creative side 

People often do not view themselves as creative, due to their upbringing, “job title” or focus on the scientific side of things. 

Story co-creation is a great way to get a team to start working together and enjoy the creative process. Tools can also be used like Rory’s Story Cubes, which are dice with different pictures and objects that can be mixed and matched to facilitate a random storytelling experience.

Overall, facilitating design thinking can improve team collaboration, cohesiveness and interaction whilst removing hierarchy, fear of failure and creativity blocks.