It’s not easy to come up with great ideas. Sometimes it helps to collaborate with other people and trust that the results will be inspiring. This collaborative model-making game is something like the Exquisite Corpse drawing game. It helps you to quickly create several models, then evaluate and choose the best elements of each.
Each team gets a design brief describing the problem, site, context, and constraints. Ideally the briefs come directly from the interviews, mapping exercises, and research that this group did in the IDENTIFY and EXPLORE phases of the design thinking process. Each team is given some thought provoking questions about their design brief, and invited to discuss it for 5-10 minutes within their group.
Everybody makes a small-scale sculpture or model of a possible solution to the design challenge they were presented. Depending on how much time you have, you can give as little as one minute or as long as 20 minutes to work on each round of the game. Every participant works on every round, and passes their model to the person on their left after each round.
Use clay or recycled materials to shape a basic structure or mass out a foundation. Don’t worry about details, we don’t need them yet!
Take the structure you are passed and make improvements to it, based on the design brief.
Take away one element of the previous person’s design. Tell them not to take it personally.
Finishing touches—add the details that make it special.
