In advance of the session

Informing participants

• If you need your participants to complete a homework or a task prior to the session, ensure this is communicated with them clearly before the meeting. Allow enough time for completion of that task.
• Sending your participants an access guide ahead of time will help them to better prepare for the meeting and have a more comfortable experience during the session. The access guide can include any of the following information:
  • address and time of the meeting
  • ways to get to the meeting
  • description of the location (e.g. seating arrangements, windows, doorways, elevators, stairways, washrooms, kitchens, water fountains, etc.)
  • description of available equipment and assistive technologies (e.g. projectors, video-conference systems, etc.)
    
  • a brief biography and image of participants

Prep work for the session

• Being conscious of who we are inviting and getting into the room; always ask 'who are we missing?,' 'whose perspectives should be present in this session?' try to ensure a diverse group of people are invited to the session
• If you are preparing any content for the session to inspire/provoke/initiate conversations, consider the following points:
  
  • you only need as much prep content to help participants start the conversation and then they will take it from there, unless you need your participants to work with specific type of content during the session.
    
  • make sure the prep content is available in different modalities (digital, physical, audio description, text description, etc.) to ensure most of your participants can get involved in the planned activities
  • Providing different types of material allows participants to quickly prototype their ideas; it also helps them to communicate abstract ideas and their thought processes
    
    

Planning the space and time

• Provide sufficient desk space to accommodate for warm up activities, note books, sticky notes and laptops
• Ensure there is enough space for navigation and moving between work stations specially if there are wheelchair users among the participants
• Plan for lots of flexibility, assuming the session would probably start late and take longer than you expect 
• Often times, participants' energy and motivation to work wanes after lunch, make sure to consider this when scheduling your session's activities
  

During the session

• If you intend to work in smaller groups during the session, try to have a group shuffling exercise in the beginning, so the groups are more equally mixed and diverse

• Ask all participants to state their names as they begin talking, e.g. “This is Sam” to help everyone in the room to recognize who is speaking. They can also help make it clear to everyone in the room that they are finished speaking by stating “That is the end of my current thought”.

• Minimize the role of facilitator. Having a team of facilitators spread around the room or integrated in different groups help balance the power dynamics. Make space for and encourage emerging leadership from the group
  

• If there are participants in the session that require audio description/ASL to be able to participate in your co-design activities, try to offer professional audio description/ASL services and inform all participants to describe visual content as desired by other participants

  • If there is shared visual content to be used in all groups, take the time at the beginning of the session to describe it to everyone. 

• Although you may send out all your workshop material to the participants before hand, there is no guarantee people read it. So, maybe talk through some of these things at the beginning
• Document the process. If permitted by participants try to capture photos of built artifacts, notes and sketches. Take note of different processes each participant or teams of people use to think through the co-design activities
• Once you do some synthesis, build in additional space for comments from those who’ve participated
  
  

After the session

• Make sure to take photos of all artifacts built during the session, and if needed collect all the notes, and sketches made by the participants
• Have a debriefing session with your team to see what worked, and what didn't and how you would do the same session differently
• You can have a little structure to get participants’ feedback afterwards to find out what went well, what could have gone better and any other feedback. Using survey monkey is one way to collect their feedback
  

Challenges

• People have a hard time getting out of their heads, it is easier to talk abstractly
• Activities that involve active note taking, drawing, and prototyping may be inaccessible or difficult to do for participants who are visually impaired, or have specific physical needs