Menu
0 share inspiring stories 575x575

Share Inspiring Stories

Once you’ve had a chance to Download Your Learnings it’s time to make sense of them. One way is to share the most inspiring stories you’ve heard with your teammates.

Stats

Suggested Time

30-60 Minutes

Level of Difficulty

Moderate

Materials Needed

Pens, Post-its, a large sheet of paper, tape

Participants

Design team


Process Phase

Over the course of the Inspiration Phase, you’ve heard stories or had experiences that stuck with you. Most likely, they won’t be the ultimate solutions to your design challenge, but chances are they’ll resonate with your teammates as well. At IDEO.org, we share these inspiring stories with our teammates so that they become part of our collective consciousness. The goal is to build a repository of stories for your team to draw from, tell, and retell. Capturing those resonant ideas and feelings, and building them into the very narrative of your team’s work helps everyone down the line.

Steps

  1. Affix a large piece of paper to the wall to capture all the team’s Post-it notes and ideas from the story in one place.
  2. Tell the most compelling stories from the field to your teammates. Try to be both specific (talking about what actually happened) and descriptive (using physical senses to give texture to the description). Report on who, what, when, where, why, and how. And then invite each of your teammates to share their own inspiring stories.
  3. As you listen to your teammates’ stories, write down notes and observations on Post-its. Use concise and complete sentences that everyone on your team can easily understand. Capture quotes, the person’s life history, household details, income, aspirations, barriers, and any other observations.
  4. Write large enough so that everyone can read your notes. Then put all the Post-its up on the wall, organizing them into separate categories for each person that your team interviewed and each place that your team visited.
  5. At the end of story sharing, you’ll have many sheets lined up on the wall with hundreds of Post-it notes. Consider this shared information as a group and begin to imagine opportunities and solutions.

Learn More

3
Case Study
Voices for Birth Justice
8
Case Study
Vroom
1
Case Study
Viva Toolkit