OptIN Kids Design Thinking Session.
Overview.
In early June 2023, Marion Design Co. facilitated a virtual design thinking session for the OptIN Kids team at Scottsboro Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Scottsboro, Alabama. The main goal of the session was to prepare and inspire the eight participants for embarking on their next project: an activity box that could be distributed to local families to help parents love their children and help kids grow in their spiritual journeys.
Background.
OptIN is a ministry of Scottsboro Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Led by Revs. Brian and Micaiah Tanck, and funded by a grant from the Thriving Congregations Initiative and support from the Cumberland Presbyterian Missions Ministry Team, OptIN strives to serve as a trade school for Christian formation. OptIN Kids is a subdivision of OptIN.
The OptIN Kids team went into this session with the idea of creating a series of activity boxes for families and children. Before developing a system for consistent production, though, they needed to make a more concrete plan for the first box. This first box’s focus would be on helping families learn to tell their own faith stories. The team hoped to come away from the design thinking session with ideas for the first box’s theme, target age range, cost, and physical form — as well as ideas for how best to build bridges between local congregations and their communities.
Objectives.
INNOVATION
One of our team’s main goals in crafting this design thinking session was to push participants to think of unexpected, out-of-the-box ideas.
HEART
The activities and materials we designed for the session had to reflect the OptIN Kids team’s heart for loving children and encouraging faith development.
BRIDGE-BUILDING
We wanted to both build bridges with the session’s participants and prepare them to build bridges with their broader community.
Process.
As we thought about how best to engage the OptIN Kids team, we asked ourselves these questions:
What makes a good story?
What makes good design?
How do we re-examine our assumptions?
How can humor bring insight into church spaces?
As we thought through our answers to these questions, we recalled Dieter Rams’ ten principles of good design: good design is innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough down to the last detail, environmentally friendly, and as little design as possible.
Hoping to encourage ideas that aligned with these principles, we developed a variety of design thinking activities as well as an accompanying visual brand identity. Along the way, we took steps to connect with the OptIN Kids team on a deeper level. We sent out a survey that helped us get to know the eight participants’ faith backgrounds and made personalized, collaborative playlists. We knew we would be in two separate spaces during the design thinking session — the OptIN Kids team in one room in Alabama, and the Marion Design Co. team in another room in Indiana — and we hoped that by sharing our stories and listening to the same music at each of our locations, we would be able to build meaningful bridges across our physical distance.
As our team designed the visual brand identity for the session — which would also serve as a prototype for the brand identity of the activity boxes — we kept in mind the heart of the project. Fun, playful shapes and a kid-friendly design came together to foster a sense of safety and creativity.
Results.
Marion Design Co. led the OptIN Kids team through a two-day design thinking session. On the first day, we facilitated the following activities:
Actors Map, an interactive activity meant to prompt thinking about who has most influenced participants’ faith stories.
Roll the Dice, a game of creating and presenting stories about how two random personas might engage in a conversation.
Humor Quiz, a chance to discover each person’s unique humor style and start thinking about the connection between humor and faith.
Law of Levity, an activity asking participants to come up with intentionally poorly-designed ideas that could be implemented in the church.
During this first day, we observed participants uncovering fresh insights, both about their assumptions and about life in the church. Bringing humor into our discussions helped to encourage more original thinking.
On the second day, we built on those insights through the following activities:
Heuristic Ideation, a process of making new ideas out of two seemingly unrelated concepts.
Building Bridges, an activity combining the people identified in the Actors Map with the concepts from Heuristic Ideation.
God in a Box, a chance for participants to engage more of their senses by physically creating box prototypes.
MadLibs, a playful way for participants to bring all their best ideas from previous activities together.
SCAMPER, an activity asking participants to look at their MadLib and diverge into new ideas through the processes of Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse.
Dot Vote, a summative activity to help make sense of the many ideas produced throughout the two-day session.
By the end of the second day, the OptIN Kids team had a whole collection of ideas to build off of as they moved forward with their project. We closed out the session by coming up with a list of next steps, including plans for Marion Design Co. to continue collaborating with OptIN Kids in the future.
For more examples of design thinking sessions we’ve facilitated, read the case studies on our sessions with the Community Foundation of Grant County and College Wesleyan Church.