What:
-208 ongoing Demola projects in 5 thematic tracks as part of our national program in Portugal.
-100 co-creation experts from our community in Portugal participated in a workshop.
-5 thematic portfolio managers from Demola Headquarters.
-592 design insights gathered by student teams and submitted into our Portal during the first 4 weeks in the process.

When:
This case study describes the activities that took place during week 5 (out of 10) among our creative community. Prior this week all teams had conducted design research phase and submitted their findings into our Portal.

Why:
Working as creative community we help our teams to discover more than they would on their own. We do not just run teams through the process, we genuinely are interested about the insights and invest our time to work with the findings. In facilitation we believe in facilitating through the findings and call this methodology content driven facilitation.

The Story of a Demola Team

Demola team consists of a co-creation expert and an interdisciplinary university student team. Each team has a mission to understand a certain phenomenon and identify change drivers in order to create states of future. Each project team has 8-10 week process and tasks to be followed to guide their way in the content production. Project teams are being launched in batches to create micro communities which share the same timeline and tasks at hand but have variety of project topics.

This case study highlights the actions of co-creation experts during week 5, so let’s take a quick look what has happened before that. Weeks 1-4 in the process guides our student teams to identify relevant stakeholders/user groups and conduct design research with the intention to understand their project phenomenon both on individual person level as well as in macro level. In the end of week 4 teams are asked to deliver their synthesis of design research in format of design insights and empathy maps.

The challenge for us is to make sure we utilize the insights widely and provide inspiring exploration journey for our community members.

The Opportunity of Receiving More Than Putting In

Week 4 has ended, and submission deadline was on Sunday evening. On Monday morning our portfolio managers check from our Portal and see that our 208 teams had submitted 592 unique Design Insights and +2500 insights in form of Empathy Maps. On average a team delivered 3 design insights and 12 insights in empathy maps. These insights were discovered through interviews, observations and benchmarking and are often contextualized and tied to a specific target group/organization.

Questions we as portfolio managers ask from ourselves at this point are:
• What if, all our teams would benefit from the work of others?
• What if, a team would have 592 insights instead of 3?
• How might we provide the findings from the whole community to a team without drowning them with information?

In this case study we will focus on our co-creation experts work with the design insights.

How Co-Creation Experts Use Demola Platform to enrich their expertise

Sunday was the submission day for our student teams and on Monday our thematic portfolio managers started their work by exporting all the design insights from our Portal as excel file.

Excel 1

First task was to curate the insight pool. Not all the delivered content was good quality or met the criteria of an insight, so we filtered out some noise from the pool (Excel 1). As an outcome of this phase our portfolio managers delivered a list of theme specific insights for our co-creation experts on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday was our internal workshop day. We had around 100 co-creation experts from our community in Portugal participating on the workshop and our 5 thematic track portfolio managers. Insights were analyzed by our co-creation experts. First task was to reveal the phenomenon that is signaling these insights (Excel 2). Co-creation experts read through the insight pool and identified commonly repeating phenomenon and marked those down with the insights representing those.

Excel 2

While identifying the phenomenon behind the insight our co-creation experts had internal questions like:
-What if I remove the context of the insight?
-What if I remove the target group of the insight?
-What do we have after removing those? What is the phenomenon this insight is signaling about?

After having a list of inspiring phenomena our co-creation experts started to analyze what these phenomena could mean for their own projects (Excel 3).

Excel 3

Often new innovations do not require new fancy inventions but are created by using existing idea in different context. Here we did the same exercise to help ourselves to see our findings from multiple alternative perspectives.

The Results

Enabled by our digital ecosystem the co-creation experts were able view and process large amount of information and insights during the workshop on Tuesday. As a result of the workshop our co-creation experts analyzed large pool of insights, synthesized those, and identified inspiring phenomena for them and their project teams.

These phenomena were then contextualized for their own projects and taken back to their teams for further development.

Next phase with our teams is the transition from researching the present to discovering change drivers and crafting various states of future.

We are working with hundreds of teams this year and producing tons of information, insights and interpretations. We are interested to pilot new ways to co-design and interpret the existing findings in our database. Whether you are a research group, strategy department, or just a curious mind please reach out to us for collaboration opportunities.

Jere Wessman
Creative Director 
jere@demola.net