To tell the whole story I have to start from October’22. Every year all the Design Factory Global Network representatives from almost 30 countries around the world meet up in one of the factories. Last year, after 2 years of postponing the meeting due to Coronavirus, we finally gathered in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. One of the main goals of this week-long event is to initiate collaboration projects between factories. A handful of people pitch their ideas in front of the audience and teams are formed to deep dive into the development.
In Leeuwarden, Laura from Fusion Point (Barcelona) told us that she had noticed that their student coaches need a bit of guidance and proposed one of the project ideas - to put together a special training for coaches. As soon as I heard the idea - I was intrigued. As I have studied group psychotherapy and active team building methods for the last 5 years, I felt that I would have a lot to contribute.
But I wasn’t alone. So - meet Scarlett - head of Design Factory Stuttgart. She knows everything about coaching design thinking teams. We discussed the problem and iterated on the ideas Laura already had. By the end of the week the main backbone of the course was created and we were really excited about it.
A few weeks later we met again via Zoom and started working on the agenda and content. One of the plans was to gather case-studies from the network. We wanted to hear more about the obstacles other coaches have had and how did they deal with them. Aalto Design Factory filmed 8 short videos documenting the different situations and solutions to them. The first time I was watching them I felt so relieved - we are not alone. Every factory has the same troubles and challenges.
After 4 months of discussing, preparing, organizing and chatting in Slack we finally met in Fusion Point. We spent the first day there to go over the topics, prepare the room and print the final exercises sheets. We also had a tour of the campus and had a lunch with the director of Fusion Point. Actually, Fusion Point brings together students and professors from three universities - Esade, Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and IED Barcelona Design University.
Finally the big day arrived. The room was impressive - 10m long LED Screen and 4 screens in front of the speaker to monitor herself, see the next slide etc. We also had a very special guest present - Felipe - Head of the DFGN. We exploited the situation and asked him to explain how warm-up games are working and why they are important. Scarlett talked about communication techniques in a team and conflict management. We also integrated two blocks of team dynamics into the program and splitted this part between ourselves. The last part of the day we spent on giving and recieving feedback. We got a lot of good insights to develop the course even further.
The third day we spent with some of the coaches and our own team discussing the case studies sent by Aalto DF, iterating the training and planning the community of practice. All in all this course is meant for the coaches working with student teams. The thing is - sometimes it happens that the professors are very experienced in their own fields but do not know much about team dynamics or how to make the team actually work - how to motivate or to support students the way they need. We created the training to make it a bit easier.
