Note: This is Part 35 of the Ruminations for Aspiring Designers series.
Introduction
Who doesn’t do workshops?
Executives and middle managers are drawn to workshops, hackathons, jams, retreats, and bootcamps. Hell, even working level people find it appealing!
The only problem is that the results are sometimes questionable – workshop does real work at times. However, it’s highly coupled with the actual context – just like design is.
Workshop is almost never the first step to take in solving any problem (the exception: workshop for the sake of workshop, commonly known as workshop theatre). A lot needs to happen before a workshop is nigh – understanding, researching, building relationships, and exploring approaches to it.
Nevertheless, its benefit goes far beyond technicalities such as building shared understanding, exploring problems, or finding solutions – it does bring people together, build teams, and make people feel inspired, creative, empowered, happy, and good.
Here’s my personal take on workshops.
Definitions
For the sake of clarification, I provide the following definitions to key concepts I use here:
- Activity: Structured sequences of talking, writing, drawing, acting, and making. Often led by one or more facilitator(s).
- Discussion: Two or more people talk, without going through any activity.
- Session: One or more person(s) talk, and go through planned or ad-hoc activities when necessary.
- Workshop: Two or more people engage in a sequence of planned and/or ad-hoc activities.
- Design Jam: Workshop where two or more people engage in a sequence of planned design activities such as creative exploration, ideation, or problem solving.
Session is the proto-concept – a workshop is a specialized type of session. A workshop can contain one or more sessions.
Session Archetypes
There are two critical dimensions that determine the type of a session:
- Emotionally challenging vs. emotionally comforting
- Intellectually challenging vs. intellectually comforting
Accordingly there are four common session types.
Table 1: Four common session archetypes.
| Emotionally Challenging | Emotionally Comforting | |
| Intellectually Challenging | Philosophy Session | Psychoanalysis Session |
| Intellectually Affirming | Trial Session | Therapy Session |
When nobody challenges anything and executives give speeches with a self-congratulatory vibe, you know you’re in a therapy session. It’s all about finding comfort and affirmations.
Likewise, in a “no bad ideas” session where nobody mentions the elephant in the room, you know you’re in a psychoanalysis session. It’s all about positive associations and “yes, and…”
When social tensions are high, politics are played out, and resolving problems doesn’t involve any technical expertise, it’s more like a trial session. It’s people themselves, not their technicality, that are on trial.
The most uncomfortable type is the philosophy type, to whom people should be challenged both intellectually and emotionally in order to get to the bottom of things. It can become very unpleasant very soon, unless there’s synergy among people involved.
Workshop Types
Similarly, a workshop has four common types.
Table 2: Four common types of workshop.
| Emotionally Challenging | Emotionally Comforting | |
| Intellectually Challenging | Co-Creating Workshop | Training Workshop |
| Intellectually Affirming | Critique Workhop | Reflective Workshop |
Surely those workshop types are not mutually exclusive – in practice they blend into each other.
So the question to ask here is not which one type your workshop is, but which types it’s leaning towards. One workshop can have a critique-leaning session followed by another reflective one; another workshop can be primarily a mix of co-creating and reflective sprinkled with a critique flavour.
The recipe is the key. When designing a workshop, you’re like a chef – you need to understand your client, to know their taste, mood, and context. Should you offer their go-to comfort dishes, or should you surprise or even challenge them a little bit with a new twist in an old recipe?
That’s how you start designing a workshop.
Variants
In practice, workshops are sessions with a thousand names.
Again, here we use two dimensions to emphasize the differences between them:
- Critical vs. inspirational: this is more about the ends than about the means.
- Depth-first vs. breadth-first: this is more about the means than about the ends.
Conclusion
All models are wrong; some are useful.
The next time you design a workshop, I hope this post gives you something new to think about.
{END}
Noah Fang 