Making Futures Work

Chapter 10. Designing the Ideation Workshop

Once you reach this stage of designing a future product or service, you may want to have a pulse check with your client and run another diagnostic to get a sense of their investment, excitement, and readiness for moving into this phase of brainstorming ideas. If for some reason they are not clear on what you will be doing, you can use some of the same tactics you used at the beginning of this journey to prepare (prime) them for the futures mindset, but this time with a focus on getting them into a DESIGN-oriented mindset—a way of thinking and participating that engages imagination and creativity to generate ideas and tangible visions. In this chapter I’ll discuss various ways to prepare participants, as well as some popular methods and tools you can use for ideation and brainstorming.

Preparing for the Workshop

Preparing people to create can be an entire preamble phase within itself and can involve tactics similar to those that were discussed in Stage 0, such as showing them examples of outputs, revealing some of the methods and how they work, getting them comfortable with creating low-fidelity sketching and prototyping, and generally creating a safe space for them to imagine while channeling everything they’ve learned during the foresight process. Sometimes simply calling your ideation workshop “The Future of [insert company name]” or “The Future of AI in [insert company name]” gives participants a sense of privilege and investment, ...