A couple of weeks ago, Rhetorikforum gave us an interesting and enjoyable workshop about non-verbal communication. Now it was time to return the favour: We introduced a very motivated group of Rhetorikforum members to Design Thinking. It was Christos’ and Enrico’s facilitating debut with teampact. They kindly got assisted by the well experienced teampact member Fabio.
The menu of the evening consisted of three courses:
The starter was one of the great classics of Design Thinking: The wallet exercise, which goes through the most important steps of the whole Design Thinking process within only 90 min. The participants from Rhetorikforum had to jump in at the deep end, since we deliberately forewent any theoretical introduction. After pairing up, their task was to design THE ideal wallet for their workshop partner. In a first phase, they had to find out how an ideal wallet should look like by interviewing each other, trying to dig for inspiring stories and emotions. As a second step, they had to visualize their findings in drawings and show them to their partners to get feedback. Finally, they could let their creativity run wild by building prototypes of their ideal wallets. It goes without saying that a few true masterpieces were created and everyone, participants and facilitators alike, had a lot of fun.
The main course, a small buffet of sandwiches, sweets and drinks, was the best reward for the group’s active and engaged participation in the workshop. While filling up the energy reserves, we used the time for an informal exchange with the Rhetorikforum members.
As the third course of the evening, Enrico served a little bit of background knowledge about Design Thinking to put the individual elements of the Wallet Exercise into a theoretical context. The practical experience and the theoretical knowledge were complemented by anecdotes and some representative cases by Enrico and Fabio. It was fun to experience a few ‘ah-ha’ moments by the audience.
On the whole, it was a very delightful evening and a fruitful knowledge exchange between teampact and Rhetorikforum. We are very grateful for the participants’ feedback and suggestions on how to further refine teampact’s Wallet Exercises for the future. The experts in psychology among the Rhetorikforum members shed light into the ratio behind separation of divergent and convergent cognitive processes, one of the key elements of the Design Thinking process. If this sounds like Aramaic to you, do participate in our next Design Thinking workshop and find out!
This event was organized by teampact with support of ETH‘s Critical Thinking Initiative.