March 03, 2021
To achieve the project's ambitious goals during lockdown and COVID-19, we worked with LNER to trailblaze new ways of collaborating and virtual working.
March 03, 2021
To achieve the project's ambitious goals during lockdown and COVID-19, we worked with LNER to trailblaze new ways of collaborating and virtual working.
To kick off our 'ways of working' experiments, we began with a 3-hour virtual high-level ideation and inspiration workshop. Attendees were a group of 20 people made up of the core project team, senior stakeholders and an enthusiastic bunch of other participants from Valtech globally.
The aim of the session was to generate as many high-level ideas as possible so that these could be themed and further refined in subsequent design hackathons. We also wanted to inspire the team in terms of where technology is heading, design, how we live, purchase and travel – to open up our minds to a variety of possibilities and to help us think creatively, which would be so important for the ideation part of the session.
Group ideation and inspiring a team are classic activities to do as a group and in person. With ideation, we tend to use collaborative and creative exercises like group sketching, set up to be fun in a welcoming and safe environment for participants. When inspiring a team in a session we often do things such as having a lot of visual stimulus (e.g., covering a room / wall with imagery), guest speakers, creative activities and allowing people to play with VR/ AR and other relevant and exciting technology.
Recreating how to do the activities we normally do virtually and to create the right vibe to allow participants to feel comfortable and engaged was challenging. Fortunately, we have found this to be really achievable and some aspects perhaps even better done virtually than in person. How did we achieve this? Read on for our top tips….
"Great virtual ideation session all, worked well!"
"Thanks guys, that was a really good session - especially when adding in that it was done remotely!"
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