The premise was simple though breathtaking: We had ninety minutes to bring 200 groups of four people from defined problem to pitchable solution.
None of the 800 people knew what they were going to do beforehand, none of them knew the problem they would be solving and none of them knew anything about Artificial Intelligence, which was the premise of the solutions they should be creating. And to top it of most of them didn’t know each other either.
The reason anybody would ask us to try to do this and have any confidence in us succeeding is that we have been working on a tool for that situation for a while — except for the school setting and the 800 people part. What we had was designed for robotics and automation of production (see background below). But we already had shown this tool to work on smaller groups of people coming together for the first time, not knowing anything up front.
We are all visual
So how do you get 800 people to go through an ideation process at the same time within a very strict time frame? Well, you prepare everything to be as self-explanatory as possible, using every trick from color coding, numbering, visual cues, help texts and a very simple process put into a canvas and a set of cards.
One of the things we know from running loads of user tests is that everybody is very visual, even though we all seem to think that this is a unique trait. So we knew from the start that we needed to work hard to get the visual clues in the canvas itself as well as in the presentation we made to guide people through the process very sharp and concise. You needed to be able to see what to do where for each single step without having to read or spend time understanding the task at hand.
However, not having any chance to help everybody on the floor seemed risky and so we decided to educate 100 students to be little helpers or Innovation Agents as we wrote on the cool t-shirts they got. This also gave us a chance to test out the tool before the main event, and the learnings from running the kids through the process was the main reason everything ended up running smoothly when the day came.
Kids rock
The kids were aged 12–15 and were picked from 14 different schools and they rocked! Without prejudice they threw themselves into the process, ideated all over the place and all wanted to do the drawing — in sharp contrast to any session we’ve run with adults who apparently all have forgotten how to draw.
So on top of all the learnings we got, we also got an army of highly enthusiastic ambassadors for the process and they were in fact a huge part of the success of the main event. Not only did they really grow with the task, bringing in spades of positive energy, they also ensured that every participating teacher manned up and pitched in so they not set a bad example for the kids.
Ownership is key
At the end of the day we actually had 200 different AI supported solutions to real world school yard problems. We had helped show 800 teachers how they could start working with tech and innovation in an easy and fun way. We had shown them how to embrace the kids native knowledge and lack of fear by letting them become the teachers on the parts they actually know more about — or at least how to get their knowledge into play.
They all brought back a tool set to start experimenting in an actual school setting and they already had ambassadors within the children that can help sell the idea to their classmates. Off course there will still be a lot of learnings and tweaking to do once the everyday teaching situation becomes a factor, and we will follow up on that to keep the tool relevant for the people it was intended for, but we have now created ownership and a feeling of success within these 800 teachers, hopefully inspiring them to keep experimenting with new ways of getting the children involved.
Background
The winding road
Regndans is a small Design Agency situated in Denmark, more precisely in Odense — the self proclaimed capital of Robotics. Everybody talks about robotics, all funding goes into robotics, the university teach robotics, the startup environments revolve around robotics and more and more of the large players worldwide start to place themselves here for that reason.
To be honest it can be a bit suffocating with all that talk of robots. Especially because it’s all about the tech. The wealth of good old production companies that do not have a clue as to how they get on board this train are stuck. Either they keep to how they’ve always done it or they throw themselves in the hands of consultants that are actually more just selling specific brands of robots. Some even get so desperate that they just buy something and then try to figure out how that might fit into their production.
Being designers with a strict focus on userneeds as the basis of anything, that picture hurt. So our way into robotics was to work out a totally non-tech low barrier way for the production companies to get onboard, by enabling them to take the first steps themselves. That meant giving them a simple process and the knowledge needed, wrapped up in a package they could see themselves using without external consultants and without halting production for days.
Never go from scratch
As it turned out we already had some interesting people in our network having the exact same thoughts within AI. Our good friends Mike Brandt and Jonas Wenke at 33A was already touring with their AI Design Sprint and we agreed to try to tweak this for robotics together. All we needed was some adjustments to their existing canvas, representing the process, and a new card set on robotics, representing the knowledge, and a lot of testing.
Fast forward through robotics conferences, discussions with educational institutions, robotics companies, production companies and other consultants, a collab with Designskolen Kolding and a specific event in one of the many robot networks and voilas — we all of a sudden found ourselves in a position to get our tool into public schools, helping our youngest to understand technology in a more concrete and hands on way, hopefully wiping out the laid back uncritically consuming ‘digital natives’ in favour of tech innovators with a more informed and critical mindset about what tech is and what it can and can’t help us with.
Jonas Deibjerg Rasmussen is Partner at Regndans, a Danish Design Agency created with his partner in crime Mark Hoppe. Together they use every and any design tool that makes sense in enabling people to solve their own creative problems. The main feat being the Design Sprint from
but in reality they build the tools on the fly and to the situation. At the core is always the user, not the tech, the politics, the organisation or the company earnings. And they are always looking for likeminded souls to work with, so feel free to hook up on LinkedIn or write to hej@regndans.dk.