May 20, 2016
The relationship between business and design has gone through deep changes in the past years. We are assisting at a convergence between business and design lead by the formalisation and adoption of design thinking and the revelation that good design is good business: many approaches from design have migrated into business and management enhancing the potential of business focused companies.
But there is a very special case of a method that was developed as an answer to a business need that has successfully migrated to design practices.
This is the case of Lego Serious Play: developed from the ’90s to improve the quality of strategic development meetings it has now been adopted by design companies to enhance creative processes, collaboration among different department, promote co-creation and participative design that includes customers, users, designers, and stakeholders.
Presented at #CassCreativity Seminar series on May 4th 2916, you can watch the whole Storyfy from this Link.
Posted in cocreation, Methodology, Organisations |
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February 12, 2016
Recently I have spent time reading and considering the future of UX and how recent research are affecting our understanding of our cognitive experiences and our perception.
I still had no chance to organise my thoughts into a decently structured article and explain what I see happening in the future. But if you are keen to know more, Marek Pawlowsky, the man behind MEX, invited me to talk about what’s boiling… And the result is a long chat (approx from min 40′) about Lego Serious Play, principles of embodied cognition and evolving research methods for the next generation of digital experiences.
Posted in cocreation, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology, Podcast, ux |
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May 17, 2015
In March 2015, I was challenged by Marek Pawlowsky from MEX to do something unique to inspire the UX designers’ community and to show them the potential of Lego Serious Play.
Marek is not a novice, being a participant into one of my past workshops, and the challenge was exciting enough for me to accept it!
The goal of the session was to inspire, entertain, make the audience curious, intrigue them, challenge their ordinary ways of thinking, introduce them to new ideas, theories and opportunities.
I’ve imagined how would a speed dating with LSP look like and this is what happened…! (more in the next page)
Patrizia Bertini demonstrates Lego Serious Play and considers creative methods for future experience design from Marek Pawlowski on Vimeo.
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Posted in Events & Fun, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology, theory, ux, Video |
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August 9, 2014
cocreation & UX
In the past few years, we have assisted to a sort of divorce between users and organisations: technology has bought in a wide range of new behaviours and opportunities that companies are not always able to follow or predict. Most innovative projects fail because it’s difficult to fully understand what’s in the users’ heads (Leadbeater 2008) and the big changes society is facing, with a shift from products to experiences makes traditional UX approaches difficult, time-consuming and less effective.
To reduce complexity and make the overall internal and external process simpler and leaner, UX today can take advantage of collaborative approaches that involve and engages stakeholders, users, and designers in a creative and participative activity, namely co-creation.
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June 12, 2014
I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a LEGO SeriousPlay workshop at Foolproof with Hot Source members. One of the participant, Marek Pawlowski, shared his experience.
As a facilitator, used to describe the method, it was refreshing and an immense pleasure to know that he experienced exactly what I always described when I talk about the power and benefits of LSP. Thank you @Marek for such an amazing post!
Improvement requires change, whether that happens gradually through iteration or in big leaps through sudden sparks of creativity. This is true of improving anything, from companies to individual products. It’s something I think about a lot in the context of the MEX initiative, which is, at its heart, about helping people to improve digital experiences. We are always looking for new ways to equip people to make good changes to the user experience of the products they’re designing.
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Posted in LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology, Organisations |
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May 22, 2014
Co-creation in action
Co-creation: who should be involved?
When saying all stakeholders we do not refer to the largest majority of users available, as they can be reached with crowdsourcing initiatives. It’s not about quantity, but quality. As several studies from early ’90s have demonstrated, involving lead users, who are those individuals that have needs that are advanced with respect to an important marketplace trend and expect to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs (Herstatt & Von Hippel 1992) can have a significant impact on the results, proving that quantity is not synonymous of quality.
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Posted in cocreation, Organisations, theory |
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April 21, 2014
LEGO Serious Play used to co-create new services at Bologna Global GovJam 2013.
Lego Serious Play is a facilitation method that was designed in ways to enhance business performance by bringing around the table key stakeholders and by facilitating the discussion and meaning sharing activities through the use of LEGO bricks, metaphors and storytelling.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a method that allows participants to negotiate decisions and strategic and operative plans and to co-create ideas creatively, socially and interactively. Thanks to the peculiar collaborative and social dynamics enacted by the method, all participants in an LSP workshop contribute to the discussion and to the decisions. The LEGO bricks act as co-creation tool and as a communication mediator: bricks are both a media to build and express complex ideas through storytelling and metaphors, and bricks act as a mediator between participants, allowing people to overcome hierarchies and power games that often affect workshop like activities and co-creation initiatives.
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Posted in cocreation, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology, theory |
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April 13, 2014
- Exploring how Privacy, UX and co-creation are related to LEGO Serious Play
LEGO Serious Play, privacy, data quality, co-creation, and UX. It seems a random list of topics, yet there’s a fil rouge that links them.
The impact of technologies has had a deep effect on how people and organisations interact: old-fashioned words, which were popular only few years ago, such as ubiquitous computing, or always on, are now everyday’s reality, making interaction and communication easier, quicker, multimodal.
Technologies and the web have produced new ways to communicate and have put people closer, offering new ways to interact. In a word, we are living in a world of conversations, where everything is conversation, as predicted in 1999 by the Cluetrain Manifesto. People interact more, users interact directly with companies, the web empowers consumers to engage in conversations with people and organisations we had no idea how to reach only 15 years ago.
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Posted in cocreation, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Legoview, Organisations |
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June 7, 2013
LSP @ GovJam
What if I apply LEGO SERIOUS PLAY to a Jam?
I should not ask myself such questions, because when I ask myself this, I want to find out the answer. So, my latest experiment was applying LSP to a GovJam. For those who are unfamiliar with the Jam concept, a Gov or Service Jam is a global event, taking place simultaneously all around the world for 48 hours, where participants, called jammers, are called to design a service or a product on a common secret theme, which is revealed just at the beginning of the Jam. The name Jam is taken by music: in a jam session musicians improvise on a common theme and make music together. The idea in a Jam of ideas, is the same: let people improvise and jam with their ideas to make new ideas together.
In a GovJam, the goal is to design a service aimed at the local public administration. Knowing how LSP can be flexible and how helpful it is when it comes to define a common topic and for team building, I thought it could be an exciting challenge to imagine and design a LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshop to enhance creativity and let people to jam ideas with bricks.
This turned out to be an exciting designing exercise which has been demanding but rewarding as well. Designing an LSP workshop for a Jam, revealed a number of key differences with the design of a ‘traditional’ workshops and this challenge lead to a dynamic, exciting and challenging workshop management. Thanks to the experience, I have had kind of a guerilla training in managing the unexpected and I have learnt a number of useful issues which will be useful for future workshop design.
So, I have identified 5 variables that should be taken into consideration when designing a workshop in any other situation where nothing is given and everything is improvised and based on the play-do-play-do mantra.
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Posted in LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology, theory |
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April 26, 2013
Organisations as organisms
A large extend of organisational theory considered organisations from a mechanistic and traditional view. However, organisations can be seen much more like living biological organism. The etymology of the two words, organisations and organisms suggests that the two terms share something much more significant that needs to be considered and looked at: they both share their greek origin, ὄργανον – organon, “instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension” but the word has been traced to descend by the Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“work, to make”).
The history of the term well reflects the shift from the original biological meaning to the much more social nature of contemporary meaning: organisation, according to the English Oxford Dictionary, appeared in 14th century in French from Latin and originally it referred to anything related to a living being. Organisation referred to the development or coordination of parts in order to carry out vital functions. From its first appearance in 1425 when the Grand Chirurgie was published and recorded the term until late 18th century, the term organisation had a specific biologic connotation. But at the end of the 18th century a new meaning come to use, and organisation started referring to “the condition of being organised; systematic ordering or arrangement; specifically the way in which particular activities or institutions are organised.” In 1790 E. Burke wrote the Reflections on the Revolution in France where he explicitly stated that society was supposed to be managed as a living organism. This passage is considered as the first evidence of the shift from the biological into the sociological realm of the term organisation.
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Posted in LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Organisations |
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