Pattern: Collaborative Reflection Workshop

Summary	Elicit design knowledge by sharing, analysing and scrutinising personal experiences.
Status	alpha	Confidence	3
details...		Group	Planet team

Problem

Technology-infused social practices produce complex and dynamic problems. Addressing such problems requires on-going design-level conversation between designers and practitioners involved in diverse aspects of the problem domain. Such a conversation is most effective when it is grounded in actual experiences, concrete problems, relevant to the participants current work, which have been solved or are still pending solution.

In order for such a discussion to be fruitful, it needs to be open, trusting and convivial. At the same time it should be critical, focused and output-directed. These qualities tend to create conflicting forces, in particular in ad-hoc communities, which cannot rely on established norms and relationships.

Context

Multi-disciplinary communities of practitioners interested in exploring a common theme of their practice.

Solution

Identify a theme of interest within the domain of practice. This theme should be focused enough to assume is would draw people who can benefit from each others' experiences, and wide enough to support rich examples and dilemmas.

Convene a workshop where participants work in groups to explore the selected theme through sharing personal experience.

Before the workshop

• Enlist the participants well in advance, ideally 3-4 weeks before the event.
• Establish a reliable medium of communication with all participants (e.g. a mailing list)
• Provide a tool for collaborative authoring of multi-media texts, and mark a clear space for the workshop within that space.
• Introduce the workshop in terms of aims, rationale and methods.
• Ask all participants to make a contribution:
  • Contributions should follow a common theme, or answer a common question.
  • They should also adhere to a common structure, realised by a template.
  • Provide an example of the desired output.
• Follow-up by -
  • Encouraging those who have not submitted a contribution to do so.
  • Commenting on the submitted contributions, and asking authors to iterate on them.
  • Pointing out links between contributions and provoking authors to comment on each other work.

On the day

Briefly present the theme, methods and objectives of the day. Introduce the first activity, and split the participants into groups.

Working in groups of 3-6, participants:

• Begin with an inspirational exposition activity, e.g. a Draw-and-tell game. The aims of this activity are:
  • To establish an open, honest and fearless tone of conversation.
  • To provoke participants to abandon entrenched forms of discourse.
  • To provide a fresh and humoristic perspective on the theme of the day.
• Each group selects a contribution of one of its members, elaborates and scrutinises it in a structured discussion, e.g. by means of a three-hats discussion. Provide the groups with a list of questions to guide the discussion.
• Use a This reminds me of exercise to elicit comparable experiences, either from the existing repository or from participants memory.
• Use a table-top concept mapping exercise to elicit key concepts and focal issues from the contributions tabled by the group (optional).
• Instruct the groups to produce a concrete artefact, which can be shared with other groups and with a broader audience.

Converge to a plenary, in which each group presents its work.
Conclude with a feedback and reflection discussion, in which participants recap their experience from the day.

After the workshop

Prompt participants to -

• Publish any new contributions which emerged on the day.
• Add details and artefacts (images, illustrations, diagrams, links, etc.) to their contributions.
• Comment on the contributions, noting questions which have emerged from the discussion.

Related Patterns

list other patterns related to this one, under categories such as component, assisting, conflicting, uses this, etc.

Extended by:

• Case Study Workshop
• Pattern Mining Workshop
• Future Scenarios Workshop

Uses:

• Draw-and-tell
• This reminds me of
• three-hats
• table-top concept mapping

Used by:

• Participatory Pattern Workshops

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

As highlighted by the power law of participation, eliciting participant contributions both before and after the workshop day is a demanding task. In order to maximise the workshop's chance of success, it is important to allocate enough resources for "community engagement", i.e. a sustained dialogue with participants, persistently encouraging them to contribute.

Obtaining participants' commitment to contribute after the workshop is even harder. For this reason, as much as time and technology permit, participants should be asked to publish their contributions during the event. The resource allocation for follow-up engagement is contingent on the plans for future use of workshop outputs.

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.