It was great to attend the workshop, but I agreee whole heartedly with Martin’s comment that it could have been 2 or 3 days long instead.

I think the thing I’d like to have covered in more detail is how to facilitate the various excercises - if you ever think of doing a workshop on facilitation skills for a design process, please let me know.

Firstly, thanks for the workshop. The only problem I found with it was, well, it should’ve been a two or three day event!

I used some of the techniques a few days later in a project meeting with a new client (a cancer charity)… I was apprehensive about the reception of the workshop and methods at first, but after twenty minutes of watching all seven people in the room really going for it, and then viewing the results (and getting some wonderful detail from them), well, it was a treat to say the least.

Picking up on some of your points concerning fun, and something I mentioned in the workshop. Fun has a very close relation to learning (except perhaps when alcohol fuelled, but I’m sure we also learn form a few of those experiences huh?) For some reason fun and learning seems to split off from each other when we hit teens, and we find it very difficult to naturally join them again. Having fun in what we do at work takes a lot of rewiring, as you put it. I read somewhere recently that the creative thinkers will someday soon inherit the earth (or did I dream-brainstorm that?)

For me, one of the most enjoyable exercises of the day was the 2 minute warm-up ideas exercise. Some of the ideas for a dog toy were well and truly worthy of patents there and then!

Overall feeling about the content of the workshops was that — and I think we discussed it briefly — there’s two distinct activities that we’re required to achieve. The first is requirements gathering. Thereafter, the second is ideas generation (or solving the problem). I felt that workshop was mainly in the second of these, but the tools of which can quite easily assist in the first as well.