Training background and context
In the second half of 2022, I was coaching a team of five university students as a volunteer Project Advisor with pro bono consulting firm Global Consulting Group (GCG). The client, Bottled Up, is a not-for-profit organisation focused on men’s mental health that was looking to expand their product offerings and explore potential partnerships with like-minded organisations.
Though the project approach had not originally been designed in a human-centred way, when I began working with the students, I saw the opportunity for greater impact through adopting a design thinking toolkit to drive research and the development of recommendations. Throughout the course of the project, I coached my project team through the design and delivery of user interviews, the synthesis of research insights, co-design with the client, and the use of design criteria to prioritise ideas.
In a regular check-in call I had with the External Relations Officer at GCG, I shared how I had been coaching my project team in human-centred design and design thinking and, seeing how much they were enjoying it and the positive impact it was having on the project, suggested that there was an opportunity for Beaker & Flint (B&F) to deliver training on this topic for the 20+ student consultants across the University of Melbourne branch of GCG. This was met with great enthusiasm, and after being introduced to the Events team at GCG, planning for the training kicked off.
My role
The key roles I played in the design and delivery of this planning were as follows:
- Connector: I prepared a brief detailing the opportunity and the impact it would have for GCG and B&F and presented this to the leaders at B&F, securing their support. I then acted as the connecting point between GCG and B&F and drove our partnership.
- Training designer: Working alongside training and facilitation experts at B&F, I led the design of the training approach and the development of supporting materials.
- Lead trainer and facilitator: At the training session, I was the lead trainer and facilitator, presenting content to the students and facilitating hands-on learning through the guided design challenge, with operational support relating to Zoom break-out rooms provided by my colleague.
The design challenge, reframed
How might we equip university students with a foundational understanding of the human-centred mindset and design thinking toolkit in a fun and engaging way?
Designing the training approach
Through a number of planning and ideation sessions that I led and ran with the B&F team, we designed and iterated on our training approach.
The core principles of our approach were as follows:
Fun and engaging: Above all, we wanted to make sure that the training was light-hearted, humorous, and casual. We wanted to create a comfortable environment within which students could learn through the user of humour, catchy mottos, and pop culture references to convey concepts in a simple and memorable way.
Practice over theory: Given the above principle, and the fact that most students were coming to the training with little to no prior understanding of human-centred design and design thinking, I didn’t want to design something that would feel like another one-sided lecture on theory. Instead, I focused on keeping theory as lean as possible, focusing on the essential need-to-knows, to create maximum space for application and practice.
Because of the lean approach taken to theory, I developed and shared pre-reading material that covered key details about the training, its learning outcomes, and links to short, engaging videos that introduced key concepts.
We also met regularly with the GCG Events Team to plan the logistics of the event, including student RSVPs and pre-sorting students into six groups for the breakout rooms.
Defining the design challenge to be solved by the students
I chose the Double Diamond model to frame the training, given its accessibility for a beginner audience. It was important to me that the students were able to put theory into practice throughout a design challenge that they would revisit at each stage of the Double Diamond. The design challenge needed to have the following:
- An easy-to-understand context that everybody would be familiar with
- A variety of different user groups, to enable the various groups to focus on different personas
What we landed on was a simple design challenge based on a Melbourne café - something that would be familiar to all the students, and would see a vast variety of people coming through its doors.
For each phase of the Double Diamond, an activity based on the design challenge was developed. An activity space was set up for each of the groups on a Miro board, and we pre-filled guidance and content into these spaces prior to the session to prompt and guide students on the day.
Sticking the landing
Armed with the facilitation guide we had developed, my colleague Rosie and I joined the Zoom call and waited for the students to arrive.
Straight off the bat, we were met with our first hiccup: instead of the 25 students who had RSVPed, we had 11. This required some quick thinking and flexibility, with some rapid behind-the-scenes work to reshuffle the breakout rooms on Zoom and adjust the Miro board. Ultimately, this ended up enabling a more intimate environment, and some great engagement from the students.
Though we did end up running over our 90 minutes, it was amazing and rewarding to see how the students responded to our content, diving into the design challenge with aplomb and creating some excellent outputs.
Learning: Sending more proactive communications leading up to a long session to act as a reminder can help you identify any last-minute apologies and better plan for the session.
The outcomes we achieved
During and after the training, we received really positive feedback from students and the Events team, with a general sentiment that the students now had a much better understanding of what human-centred design and design thinking are, and how to apply them to their next consulting projects with GCG and the rest of their careers. The students thanked us for taking the time to design such an engaging and high-quality session, and we are now discussing how to improve upon the session to be run at other GCG chapters.
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