The Virtual Workshop - Designing for Digital Engagement

As part of the Salus Healthy Cities Design Conference 2020, CBRE and Heta Architects partnered to design and facilitate a virtual workshop to explore, post-Covid, what a healthy hybrid ecosystem of work looks like, including and beyond the office.

‍

‍

‍

The Virtual Workshop: Designing for Digital Engagement

‍

As part of the Salus Healthy Cities Design Conference 2020, Heta and CBRE partnered to design and facilitate a virtual workshop to explore, post-Covid, what a healthy, hybrid ecosystem of work looks like, including and beyond the office. The facilitators were Yvonne Pinniger and Namrata Krishna from Heta Architects’ Design Advisory team, and Muriel Altunaga from CBRE’s European Workplace team. We had originally planned to run the workshop face-to-face, but like many things in the last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference got moved into the virtual world. We’ve written in depth about the goals, findings, and insights that emerged from the workshop itself, and you can read more about that here, but in this piece we wanted to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of running a workshop entirely through our screens, which demanded a creative approach and some rapid upskilling on the part of everyone involved.

‍

As human-centred design practitioners, the three of us were well-versed in designing and delivering interactive and engaging workshops, but moving to the digital world required a significant amount of time and resource investment which we hadn’t quite prepared ourselves for. We knew we had to make the session interesting and dynamic not only for the audience, but equally for our group of knowledgeable participants, all of whom were experts in their respective fields and very familiar with good workshop techniques.

‍

Building in Variety

‍

When designing the workshop, we had to consider the capabilities and limitations of the online platforms we were using, the digital literacy of the participants, and delivering an experience where everyone involved felt like they had contributed to and learned something around our chosen subject. The workshop was also being broadcast a bit like a television show, with a small number of people who were directly involved in the workshop, and a larger, but unknown number of people who were watching the workshop as an event. Therefore, the session had to use tools that enabled everyone to collaborate effectively by generating ideas, raising questions and sharing opinions, while also allowing us as facilitators to shape and guide the conversation. It also needed to be entertaining, not just for those participating, but for those watching.

‍

We decided to split the workshop into three parts - the first was scene-setting where we as design strategists, and hosts, shared our knowledge and thinking on the future of the workplace. This meant our experts could sit back and listen for the first 15 minutes as a way to ease into the subject matter. Like in any good workshop, however, we wanted to then hand over the mic to the participants for the rest of the ‘show’, and kicked off the engagement activities with the exploration of two different knowledge-worker personas, Adele and Lee. Finally, we wrapped up by asking our participants to share their expertise and thoughts on what should be considered when designing this ideal ecosystem of work. At the transition points in the workshop we did some coordinated, and amusing, stretching exercises and launched short, interactive polls, where the participants and audience members could all take part.