Facilitation
Through my roles as a designer and design researcher, I have been able to facilitate collaborative activities to help groups and organizations develop ideas and evolve those ideas into concrete action. Facilitators work to connect people and ideas, provide guidance, manage the logistics of interactions, and create the overall space and tone for positive collaboration. Sometimes we are also asked to contribute our own knowledge and insights to a given engagement.
Some of the recent projects that I have facilitated and co-facilitated include:
My goal as a facilitator is to carefully plan a workshop and its activities so that I (and my co-facilitators) provide the optimal balance of structure—through specific questions, tools, activities, and frameworks—that is makes it easy for participants to engage with and explore ideas while also keeping them focused and moving forward towards the goal of an engagement and overall project.
The key starting point for me is to ask my collaborators and clients, “What do you want people to know and be able to do at the end of each engagement?” Generally speaking, we want participants to share experiences and knowledge and leave the workshop with plans for action. More specifically, possible goals of a workshop could include:
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Discover and learn more about a given topic, context, or problem
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Make sense of a given context or problem
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Align diverse stakeholders around a goal or orientation
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Frame problems in order to better understand context and variables
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Create action plans and processes to move projects forward
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Ideate potential actions, projects, or solutions
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Develop specific solutions to a given prompt or problem
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Evaluate an approach or solution