Good Morning Starshine

I session-ed.

I had a handful of juniors that participated--a few jumped in or out, but three were consistently participating throughout.

The generation of the role-play scenario was kind of like pulling teeth. I don't think they really understood why I was asking them to do all of it. Note to self: don't treat the material like it exists in a vacuum when working with people--they want to help and are more willing to do so when you let them in a little. These guys are redonkulously silly, though, so once they realized they were allowed to be silly, I ended up with one of the conflict characters being a designer named Phoebe who really loved the color purple because Barney was her hero. She also happened to be putting herself through school by stripping and wasn't terribly concerned about compromising because she was making lots of money in her side job, so what would she need school for anyway? See? Redonkulous.

Side note:

Redonkulous

re.donk'u.lous adj.

1. significantly more absurd than ridiculous to an almost impossible extreme; without possibility of serious consideration.

Anyway, I came away feeling like not much had actually happened. Adrienne and I had a little meltdown in the hallway and started to talk about... well, everything. After a patented Adrienne pep talk for each of us, we talked about the session and she helped me realize that they actually did give me a ton of information--just not what or how I expected.

My initial analysis of the generative session has resulted in the following insights:

• With these designers, interpersonal conflicts really are all about leveraging conflict styles.
• TKI may need to be given heavier emphasis than even I had considered.

And from an unintended tangent of discussion with them, I’ve realized that I know all the content I need to know at this point and I need to allow myself to be in Form-land now. These students are very connected to their needs and are fairly articulate when it comes to expressing them. When we got off on the tangent of what the “thingy” might be, they immediately shut down any idea of it being digital or virtual (deep sigh of relief). They basically said that designers are glued to their computers all the time and if this tool were to exist in that realm, it would be easy to overlook it's potential and forget about it's existence. It is really important to them (especially when working on group issues) to be able to extract themselves from their computers and interact with something physical that gets them engaged with the problem in a positive way.

The insights I gained from this part of the conversation were that the tool really needs to be:

• non-digital
• HIGHLY interactive
• cheeky & fun (cheeky is my word--they're closer to snarky, but I think it's important to tone that down just a little if I want to consider a wider or more transferrable use for this tool)

I'm starting to go back the the functionality of Unstuck ( http://amzn.com/B0017HZ0YG) that meets the design/humor feel of these posters:

I know that dry humor in either wording or design needs to exist, but one of my concerns is that it doesn't get so amusing that people don't take the tool (or their problem) seriously.