The global pandemic has altered daily life for nearly everyone on the plant. Families are finding their routines suddenly and dramatically disrupted. Normal school, activities and family and friendly gatherings have often been replaced for virtual alternatives or no alternatives at all. All of this disruption has caused stress in our own families. As professional facilitators however, it made sense to bring some of the tools that we use to help organizations and businesses home. Literally.
Design Thinking is a design process developed to help break down complex problems in changing and challenging environments. Design Thinking processes take active steps to help build empathy, define a problem, ideate, prototype and test solutions.
In this case you and your children are the customer, so empathy step is pretty easy. Your challenge also might be different, but in our case we struggled to find quality activities to do together as a family that didn’t involve the kids glued to their devices. So the define step is also pretty clear. Taking that purpose on we can start the exercise:
Brief: What are activities we can do as a family between the hours of 5 and 8 pm that doesn’t involve a screen?
(You should feel free to adjust these guardrails to suit your family! Another option might be What are weekend adventures we can create this summer without ever having to leave the neighborhood?)
Night 1
Time: 30 – 45 mins
Materials:
- Post-it notes
- Markers
- A wall
- Stop watch (on your phone)
- A sheet or two of small stickers (we nerds use sticky dots), but you can also use markers or pencil to mark your vote.
Instructions:
- Take 5 minutes to brainstorm ideas. Write down one idea on each post-it and make a little pile of ideas in front of you. The idea here is quantity over quality – some of your ideas might seem off the wall initially (or forever). By the end of 5 minutes, you should be slowing down the pace of ideas being written. If you still have more energy in the tank – add a minute and keep brainstorming!
- When the group cannot possibly come up with any more ideas, have each person stand up in front of the group and read out their ideas as they stick them to the wall. All ideas welcome (make sure you have your “Yes, And…” attitude with you).
- Once all the ideas are up on the wall, have everyone work together to group the ideas into categories (for example, Sports, Arts and Crafts, Food Related, etc.). Remove any exact duplicates.
- Now that you have the ideas categorized and organized, give each member 6-10 votes depending on how many ideas you have (the more ideas, the more votes you will want to distribute. You really can’t mess this part up and little kids love the voting!). Have each person vote for their favorite ideas by sticking a dot to the sticky note. For ideas that you really really love, you can give more than 1 vote (just be careful of the culprit that will skew the votes by placing ALL of their on the silliest ideas (like “Pretend You Have Dog Night”).
- After all the votes are in, stack the sticky notes with the most highly voted on the top role – It might look like a tree when you are done.
High five – you are done with the first workshop – how easy was that?
Next time, we will talk about and start to plan for the activities that got the most votes.
Night 2
Time: 1 hour
Materials:
- Your Ideas that got votes from session 1
- Markers
- A wall
- If you have large white sticky paper, otherwise just a wall will do
Objective: To make a concrete schedule for completing the activities – something that the group can act upon. Don’t overcomplicate the planning just yet!
Instructions:
- On your white sticky paper or using new post-it notes, make a calendar on the wall. If you are brainstorming ideas for weeknight evening activities, maybe make a calendar for the next month. If you are planning for summer weekends, list out the 8-9 weekends of the summer.
- Starting with the most highly voted idea, have an open discussion about what it will take to complete that activity. Is this something we can put together on the spot, or do we need to do some planning for it? And when do we want to do this activity? Is it better for a Friday night when we are able to stay up a little later? Or do we need to pick up food from the market or decorate the house?
- Place the activity on the calendar and add in any extra time that you might need to plan.
