Workshops and facilitation

UX Australia 2023

For UX Australia 2023, I assisted design and facilitation of The Art of Effective Workshops, an in-person half-day workshop designed to assist UX designers and researchers in the transition from the screen-age Covid workshops back to in-person facilitation.

Our objective and approach

We set out to help people run workshops with confidence by understanding what makes a session work, what can go wrong, and how to improvise and respond in the moment.

We wanted participants to leave with a working grasp of how to plan and run a workshop, and feel ready to try it themselves the next day. We framed facilitation and workshop design as a skill that improves with rehearsal, and introduced this through two stages:

Backstage - Preparing for success
How to prepare, align your purpose, and design a workshop with intention for maximum impact.
Centrestage - The Theatre of Workshops
What it means to be a good facilitator, the balance of confidence and authenticity, and how to improvise if things get hairy.

Preparation

Mural

We created a Mural as our presentation for the in-person session. The mural was 'theatre' themed using isometric illustrations, representing the two stages of the workshop:

Part 1 - Backstage - Preparing for Success

Part 2 - Centre Stage - The Theatre of Workshops

Placemats

For in-person collaboration, we created A0 placemats for participants to brainstorm and interact with throughout the workshop.

Scenarios

Creation of scenarios for team activities in the workshop, scenarios written and illustrated created by me.

Workbooks

We designed workbooks to be printed for each table to assist in-person collaboration and interactivity.

Agenda

In order to maximise the effectiveness of the session (and epitomise the art of effective workshops!) we created a comprehensive agenda outlining roles, activities, and audiovisual cues to help the session run smoothly.