Clustalk

At LEF Future Center, I lead the design process behind Clustak. It's a creative facilitation toolkit, meant to improve participants' interaction during sessions for governmental challenges at Rijkswaterstaat. The toolkit assists participants in making more use of visual thinking.

My work includes conducting user-centered research, defining scope, designing tools and prototyping them, and using the most suitable techniques to evaluate the concept in a real-world situation. 

Role

User Researcher, facilitator, project manager

Skills

Contextmapping, focus groups, co-creation, prototyping

Challenge

To improve participants' interaction during creative facilitation sessions at LEF Future Center, assisting them to make use of more visual communication.

Research methods

› Observations in context

› Facilitators' interviews with generative tools

› Contextmapping

What was missing?

It was confirmed that clustering is an important phase of sessions but not included on the creative diamond approach used by facilitators. Thus, an investigation of possible ways of clustering was performed.

Research methods

› Statement cards

› Desk research

Besides the classical creative diamond, newer studies have shown the need to differentiate a step in between the divergence and convergence phases. It is called "revergence" and aims to revisit and rearrange every generated idea during the divergence, by making clusters.

The problem

Not every facilitator does the converging phase of the session, and many are not aware of the revergence as a separate stage from converging. In the end, clusters of ideas can be created in a messy way, leading to deliverables for clients that may not show the full creative potential of the session.

Ideation methods

› Rapid prototyping

› Creative facilitation

In order to iterate on ideas quickly, I chose to develop and test ideas, bringing them to life with three different paper prototypes.

Insights

The organization of ideas came naturally when a structured mean (see picture on top) is used to actually make the clusters itself. Besides, a structured and divided sticking note was developed, with delimited spaces for both drawings and written summary of ideas.

Delivery methods

› Prototype

› In context user test

The final design is a toolkit for performing the reverging phase - the Clustalk toolkit. As a way to stimulate participants’ generation of ideas and the creation of clusters, the design of the tool thus focuses on supporting facilitators to perform the revergence phase of sessions. The Clustalk is meant to be within LEF's space, where others tools are already used and displayed.

Evaluation

The concept was evaluated in two workshop settings, and 14 LEF's facilitators performed the tests. Moreover, further development of the design was indicated by the end of the project, mentioning to add a digital version of the toolkit for every LEF's facilitator, so it can be checked whenever they want.