This is a simple photoessay of 4 days of prototyping a workshop activity. Wednesday

I have a new workshop to deliver in July for a conference. The topic has not been defined yet so I am experimenting with possibilities. This post is about one idea I’ve developed to physical prototype level. With workshops, I need to see and use the planned activity to understand…

For 2023, I’m starting to coach people in workshop design and facilitation skills. This post is about the idea of coaching and the choice to be a coach. Becoming a facilitator The diagram at the top of this post has four roles on it – teacher, facilitator, tutor and coach. I mostly work…

Designing and delivering your own workshop can be daunting. The mixture of design questions (like What is being taught? How can people learn? How do we share?) and facilitation questions (like How do we invite and welcome people? How do we create trust and safety?) can be a complicated mess. …

GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) AI systems, like many other AI systems, are trained on large amounts of existing text data. This data is used to help the AI system learn how to generate text that is similar to the input it was trained on. However, this reliance on existing text…

I design and facilitate a lot of different workshops. The last few years of hybrid and fully virtual workshops has meant I have adjusted a lot of ways I work. One thing I have added is physical versions of the content, like cards sent to participants. This was to try…

Museums and other cultural places (like libraries and cafes) are excellent spaces for enabling people’s abilities to recall and share memories. This practice can be particularly beneficial for older adults and people with memory impairments like dementia. Using Guided Reminiscence, we can use the sensory environment and experiences of the…

“Good design is invisible” is a fairly smug cliché among designers. Affordance It is based on the idea of Affordance. The idea that some design can be so intuitive, so obvious that people just use the product or service. They do not notice it as they benefit from it. However, there…

Designing and facilitating workshops can seem overwhelming (especially now workshops can be stretched from a physical room to a virtual space). There are many issues. For example: How to think about fitting all the content for a workshop in the time available? How to invite and welcome people to a…