Creative Sessions: Playing with serious stuff

A creative session is a gathering of people who, following some steps and rules shaped by a facilitator (or organizer), let their creativity loose. Working together, in one or more teams, they eventually generate ideas for the subject matter in question. The session doesn’t need to have very strict guidelines in order to work. As long as it is well organized most likely creativity and inspiration sooner or later emerge (Grudin & Pruitt, 2004).

I have participated in a couple of creative sessions and always found them extremely useful as a means to let your mind go free and be creative in solving problems or in generating ideas and so I wanted to share with you the process that I followed while organizing one such activity during my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project in which we were dealing with emotions in hotel environments.

As a kick-off for the conceptualization phase of the project, I decided to organize a creative session in an attempt to generate as many initial ideas as possible from a non-biased team of designers and non designers. These ideas would later be used as inspiration for the development of concepts that meet the design guidelines defined earlier in the process.

It is generally recommended that the facilitator/organizer of the session is not directly involved in the project at hand, in order to avoid its knowledge and insights of the project’s goal to interfere with the creative process; therefore a colleague was contacted to take the leading role in the organization of the session (my friend Ricardo Mejia, who by now is an expert on the subject).

It is also recommended to make a video of the session so that you have a record to come back to interesting things that might have happened during the creative process.

Setting and participants

In an attempt to create an atmosphere which would allow the creativity of the participants to flow freely, it was decided to hold the session in an informal and inspiring setting. The session took place at night in an apartment, along
with some drinks and snacks for the participants and plenty of blank paper, color markers, sticky notes and various  other materials that could be used in a creative way. The whole activity lasted around 2 ½ hours.

The participants involved were:

• A facilitator/organizer (a Strategic Product Design master student)
• 3 design master students (Design for Interaction & Integral Product Design )
• 3 non-designers (an oceanographer, a civil engineer and a chemical engineer)

The creative session

Ice breaker

A small activity was conducted to introduce the participants to each other and to make them feel a bit more  comfortable talking about the subject with which we would be dealing during the session. Each participant was given a name tag sticker where they could write their name and place it on their chest, and they were asked about what they would like to do and where they would like to go on their next vacation. There was a map of the world available for the whole group, where they could draw lines to show how their trip would be, and while doing so they would tell a bit about themselves.

Introduction: Hotels and emotions

After this quick icebreaker, a brief introduction was made to explain to the participants what the domain of the project was (hotels) and the importance of emotions within it. The participants were told that we would be discussing emotions and  hotels, but not the fact that the project’s goal is to assess such emotions. This was done to avoid steering them too much towards this specific direction from so early in the creative session process without allowing them to explore the domain first.

A quick explanation of what is understood by emotions (the appraisal theory and the emotional response triad) and the fact that they can be elicited by both material and social stimuli was also given as a theoretical background in an attempt to avoid confusion during the subsequent activities.

Brainstorming about emotions and stimuli

The next activity in the planning was to brainstorm about different emotions and stimuli you might feel as a guest while staying in a hotel. For this, it was decided to use the LEM Emotions characters (Huisman & van Hout) developed by SusaGroup as a starting point to inspire the participants, since they portray more or less the same emotions identified previously through an online survey as being relevant to the domain of hotels.

A printed version of each single character was placed on the center of a blank A0 sheet of paper, onto which sticky notes could easily be glued. The first part of this brain storming dealt with the participants’ interpretation of each character. A circle was drawn around each character, and the participants were asked to write down on sticky notes every emotion that they thought that each character was portraying and to glue them within this circle.

The second part dealt with the different stimuli that would generate such a reaction on people while in a hotel, and so a second concentric circle was drawn and the participants were asked to write down any situation, event, person or thing that they considered could elicit such a reaction in a hotel guest, and they were asked to glue these new sticky notes within the second circle. The results of this activity were 8 emotional posters which included an interpretation of what each character represented and the stimuli for such a reaction as can be seen below.

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Storyboarding with personas

The participants were separated into three groups of two people each. One group consisted exclusively of designers, one of non-designers and the third one was mixed. Each group would select 2 of the emotional posters created in the previous activity and go into a separate room where they would receive an A4 page with the description of a persona. They also selected 2 of the emotional posters to work with.

The assignment was simple, each group was asked to create a storyboard of the hotel stay of the personas they were assigned and to include the emotions they chose as an integral part of their story. This could be done both by drawing or writing down what would happen in each story.

For this, each group was given some sheets of A3 paper with only a few sequentially placed blank squares on them, so that it would give them an idea of a sequence of events (like in a comic). This was done specially for those non-designer participants who were not familiar with the concept of story boarding.

The 3 personas were created trying to follow some stereotypical profiles that could easily be found in a hotel, and are described here to the right.

The groups worked as follows:

Group 1:

• 2 non designers
• Emotions: Sadness and Satisfaction
• Personas: Sarah and Peter.

Group 2:

• 2 designers
• Emotions: Fascination and Boredom
• Persona: Michael

Group 3:

• Mixed group
• Emotions: Joy and Disgust
• Personas: Andy, Jane and Thomas

At the end of this activity, each group was asked to briefly introduce to the rest of the participants the persona they had been assigned and to explain the scenario that they had created for their story.

Role playing and brain storming

After a short 5 minutes break, the participants were finally introduced to the project’s general idea of assessing the emotions felt during a hotel stay. They were then given name tags from a well known hotel chain and for the coming phase of the creative session, they were asked to start thinking as if they worked for the hotel instead of being the guests.

The participants were then separated into 3 new groups, different from the ones previously arranged, and they were assigned one of the storyboards to work with. They were then asked to try and generate as many ideas as they could of possible ways to assess the emotions of the personas in the storyboard they received.

After 20 minutes, the storyboards with these initial ideas were exchanged between the groups and they were asked to elaborate on the ideas that the previous group had come up with. 15 minutes later this was repeated once more to allow all groups to interact with each others’ storyboards and ideas. The storyboards can be seen underneath, with some of the ideas on post its placed around them.

Storyboard 1

Storyboard 2

Storyboard 3

Clustering and evaluating ideas

The ideas generated were then clustered and evaluated depending on how well they fit in the context, and the most interesting ones were later taken as a starting point for the conceptualizing phase of the project, where they were further developed.

For a couple more examples of creative sessions, you can visit Ricardo Mejia’s website.

SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• Blank Storyboard Format (PDF)
• The development of a graphical emotion measurement instrument using caricatured expressions: the LEMtool (Huisman, van Hout) – PDF