An interesting way to support the design process consists in giving workshops related to the subjects along the development process. Experts from MediaLAB and other professionals give the workshops and eventual lectures regarding various subjects along the semester such as user testing, prototyping, business model canvas and others. This post is related to the Make it Visual Workshop and the Ideation Workshop.
In the Make it Visual workshop we were introduce some basic techniques in visual thinking and visual harvesting. These techniques are used to help ones to communicate about ideas more effectively, both within the team and towards people.
We had other valuable workshop named Ideation. In this opportunity we started checking our understanding of the problem. In order to generate good ideas, it is vital to fit them well within the problem context.
The workshop introduces several high-paced and productive exercises that can be used to generate lots of ideas in a short time frame. The team will then try and cluster the idea into potential solutions. Some of the most important goals of the workshop are to get the mind opened and change the way we look at the world.