DBL’s Design Thinking Workshops

What to Expect

Our workshops are hands-on, engaging, and produce results that will set your team on the right track to actually developing solutions to real problems. Each workshop is tailored to your organization’s goals, but generally follow a similar format, which includes:

Introduction to Design Thinking

We provide a crash course on the Design Thinking methodology, the mindsets required to use it in your organization, and the benefits to designing client-facing solutions using these techniques. Our introduction will get your team thinking big, understanding that innovation is a discipline, and that it doesn’t take millions or dollars or years of time to design something valuable for your clients.

Empathy Interview

One of the most important tenets of Design Thinking is to bring in the voice of your end-user to ensure you are designing something useful that will work in his or her environment. The interview can be conducted with a client, a business stakeholder, a law firm lawyer, a member of staff - anyone for whom you hope to design a solution. The insights gained in these interviews serve as the foundation for the rest of the work that will be done.

Problem Statement Development

Defining the problem or challenge you are hoping to solve is half the battle. There are great lessons to be learned in this workshop segment for teams of all kinds. So often, as teams, we spend unnecessary time complaining about what’s not working, repetitively having the same conversations, or discussing the symptoms rather than the cause of something not working. Learning to stop and take time as a team to define the problem you are experiencing can be a powerful tool for greater productivity.

Ideation

Another great technique that can be brought back to your workplace, and team and client meetings, is the practice of ideating. We challenge teams to rapidly come up with as many possible ideas/solutions as they can, without self-filtering. Through the facilitation, we encourage you alternate between thinking big, thinking practically, building upon one another’s ideas, and not being afraid to come up with something that won’t work. It’s all part of the process.

Prototyping

Prototyping is about giving shape to your idea - making it visual - so that it can be presented to an end-user for feedback or give someone on your team a feel for how it would solve the problem you are setting out to tackle. In some workshops, we provide physical materials for prototyping. In others, we challenge teams to simply draw out their ideas. This step in the workshop can also be performed as a hackathon, involving real technologists who rapidly take a team’s idea and develop it into a simple software mock-up.

Presentations & User Feedback

What good is your idea if you can’t communicate it back to your user/client? In the final segment of our workshops, we ask teams to present their ideas - generally as 60-second pitches. Ideally, our end-users, who participated in the empathy interview at the start of the workshop, are able to return to hear the pitches and provide real-time feedback. The lesson we hope participants take away here, particularly lawyers who are trained to perfect before they present, is the value and power in getting your ideas out to user/clients early and often. This allows you to pivot without wasting resources, and ensure you’re continuously designing with your end-user in mind.

andy@designbuildlegal.com / kate@designbuildlegal.com

For more information, visit our Design Thinking resources page.

ABout design thinking

Design Thinking is a creative approach to problem solving and designing new solutions. It starts with building empathy for your end-users, encourages collaboration and rapid ideation, and challenges you to test your ideas before investing too many resources. Design Thinking helps you design services and solutions that will delight your clients and customers!