I have a special interest for design methods and creativity techniques, along with coordinating people and activities. That is why I decided to take part in the elective course ‘Creative facilitation’ offered during my Master studies.
Within the course I learnt how to lead teams through a creative process in order to solve complex design issues or generate new opportunities for organizations. Besides, I learnt how to be more creative myself and how to select the right methods for a specific problem.
Everyone is creative, but it can be practiced, enhanced and sharpened to lead to much more richness and quality. Learning to become creative really happens through experience, by looking at other people practicing creative tasks, by trying recipes oneself, by finding out what works and what doesn’t, and last but not least, by discovering oneself in the context of creative tasks. – Marc Tassoul
Some of the knowledge I gathered include:
Ice-breakers and rules for creative thinking, in order to generate an open and trustful atmosphere within the team
Problem abstraction and redefining the objective in context
Group and individual ideation methods to create a dynamic session, such as How to questions, brainwriting, flower and chain associations, analogies…
Evaluation tools to assess the ideas and develop the most promising ones into concepts
Apart from gathering experience on the academic level, where I facilitated two creative sessions on healthcare and sports related topics and participated in many others, I have also gained experience by joining several company cases.
I was the facilitator for a Service Design case at Essense design agency, where we looked into waste separation behaviour of citizens for Rijkswaterstaat.
I co-facilitated a case at KPN on how to manage digital identities. In addition, I participated as a team member on cases at Low&Bonar and Boon Edam, through which I could also learn from others’ way of doing.
