Design Slam is the seventh in our series of Design Games.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post or refer to our other design games.

Description of Design Slam

In a design slam a team works together to create a solution to a design problem. A design slam is usually conducted under some time pressure, and there may be a prize for the ‘winner’.

Design slams are good for identifying potential design solutions, but are also good for a team to learn about how to work together.

Tips

The design problem may be a real one, a completely artificial situation or a situation close to a real-life one.

Participants should be encouraged to generate a couple of ideas and choose one to submit as their solution. The idea should be fairly high-level, not a screen-by-screen interface.

Think about how you would like the team to present their work. For the IA Slam (an annual event at the IA Summit), participants must create ‘one eye-popping page’ that represents their idea.

If you are using this game to help a team learn how to work together, you may wish to assign roles, identify roles that the team needs to assign, or just allow the team to figure each other out.

Prepare

You may like to prepare just a brief summary of the problem, or a full back story with props & artefacts.

Provide paper, markers, sticky notes and other stationery.

Run

Explain the design problem plus any constraints or issues to participants. Explain that they are to come up with a creative solution to the problem

Explain any time constraints and exactly what they are to produce as an outcome. Encourage them to initially generate a number of ideas before selecting one to document and explain.

Analyse

Little to no analysis is needed for this game. Its purpose is to help teams look at a problem in a different way and break out of existing patterns not to create a real design solution.

Notes

The Information Architecture Summit has a design slam every year (appropriately called the IA Slam). The photo above is from the 2007 IA Slam (photo credit: lopolis). It is always slightly crazy and a lot of fun.