Il Ricettario dei Laboratori

In 2018, I worked in a team to collaborate with an Italian association that organizes free courses for foreigners in the city of Trento. Our role was to understand their organization and practices to develop a project that would support their teaching activities. We used a combination of user-centered and participatory design methods with qualitative research techniques to define a design space and involve the volunteers in the development process. Our final deliverable was a cookbook of tailored design thinking recipes.

During our observations and interviews, some volunteers told us they needed a new online management system because the one they already had was not being used. The volunteers were stuck with the idea that one piece of software could solve all their organizational issues and we were the "computer kids" to the rescue. So we decided to organize a workshop where the volunteers had to discuss their organizational structure and mission statement in order to build a structure that represented the current state of the association. We used the prototyping of a strange sculpture to create space for a serious and tiresome discussion to happen in a playful yet structured way. After this exercise, they said that the discussion was really helpful and they wanted us to run other workshops to help them with organizational aspects. They had the knowledge to work on this but struggled to identify pain points and ideate solutions as a team. The design techniques we had been using seemed ideal, so we created a guide to design tools tailored to their needs. I am excited about this project because we resisted the temptation of creating "yet another app" and really embraced design methods and tools to understand the implicit issues of the organization.

Download the cookbook of design thinking recipes.