Tapping Into Conference Participants’ Brilliance
by AlexaAt our recent MX Conference, we set out to capture emerging insights from the speakers using our graphic recording skills. With 4-5 colored markers fanning out from between our fingers at any given moment (picture a wolverine claw), we illuminated the speakers’ talks with memorable visuals and colorful typography. (Pictures coming soon.) On the last day of the conference, as I was running around with a pack of sticky notes trying to identify common themes across talks, it occurred to me: What if the conference participants were involved in this process?
At every conference I’ve attended, I’ve heard people express that they get as much out of interacting with other attendees as from the speakers. Everyone has a story to tell, but there’s only so much people can articulate in response to the FAQ, “What did you think of the talk?” It’s made me think: As design researchers, we often use hands-on, participatory techniques to draw latent insights out of our participants. Why don’t we use these same strategies to draw out and capture conference participants’ ideas?
What are some activities that could encourage deeper conversations and equip people to document their thoughts? What could conferences do to give people something to “triangulate” around — besides the wonderful food? Here are a few I’ve seen (not only at conferences, but at social events, college dorm walls, our office bathroom, etc.):
Graffiti Wall: Put up a giant piece of paper with some initial structure and encourage collaborative graphic recording — where participants can add their own notes, sketches and insights to a giant mural. Stickers and collaging images and words could be provided as well.
Open Whiteboards: Write questions on giant sticky notes (e.g., “What is service design?”) and put them in the halls where people can write on it during breaks. It could give people something to talk about while providing a forum for expression.
Five Minute Madness: We do this in our staff meetings: Someone makes an audacious statement that they may or may not agree with (e.g., “Experience Designer is a meaningless job title.”), and we discuss it for five minutes. Something like this could also be done on giant pieces of paper.
Projected Messages: Have a computer hooked up to a projector where people can type (or Twitter) ideas and thoughts and see them projected. Providing a question or conversation prompt, as described in Open Whiteboards and Five Minute Madness, might encourage participation.
Birds of a Feather: Place a “topic card” on each of the dining tables, such as “design research” or “managing internal experience teams” and encourage people to find a table with a topic that interests them.
Thinking about conferences you’ve attended (or planned), have you seen (or thought of) any other interesting strategies for helping people get their thoughts out there?
Update: UX Evangelist David Crow explores these ideas further on his blog.
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May 1st, 2008 at 2:58 am
I must say the visuals (enhancements) that your people added to the speakers talks are absolutely wonderful. It is as you write a great idea to get the participants to interact with the talks and sessions. That way participants will remeber more of the ideas they are exposed to. One could use mini versions of Open Space meetings with themes of the sessions, thereby collecting the creative power of the crowd.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:02 am
[…] on the main Adaptive Path blog, Alexa wrote about the graphic recording she and the team created in the back of the MX conference. […]
May 1st, 2008 at 11:51 pm
[…] was prompted to think about this after reading a blog post on Adaptive Path about this very topic here and after watching one of my own UCD groups use overhead projections and whiteboarding. But this […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
[…] Winner for most useful detail: graphic recording. During each session, AP staffers in the back of the room graphically recorded the presentation, in the end producing a large set of illustrated note-diagrams. I first learned about graphic recording in college, when, on the first day of my Community-based Planning class, our professor surprised us by taking notes this way. Since then, I’ve learned that graphic recording is really hard to do. I was particlarly impressed by the conference-wide summary graphic, and the process by which they produced it. After the last session, recorders went through each session’s board and made post-it notes of the key points. Then, they arranged the post-its on the summary board until they came to a sensible layout, after which they removed the post-its and drew in the final graphics. Check out the flickr pool showing all the boards. Update: Alexa from AP muses about ways to encourage more audience participation in graphic recordings. […]