Workshop: Bristol #2

Last Thursday we held the second Minimum Viable Book workshop in the very wonderful Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. Many thanks to our lovely hosts, Clare, Hannah, Verity and Tom.

We learnt a lot from our first workshop thanks to the wonderful feedback we received from the London participants. Having a bunch of improvement suggestions meant we could iterate our format in the following ways:

• We ran over-time in our last session, so this time we asked everyone to vote and prioritise the topics so we could cover the things they were most interested in first – we planned to run out of time again. Interestingly, the group chose to cover two of the same topics as London: UX and Design and What can go Wrong.
• We received some feedback from a few London participants who said they were most interested in discovering stories of Agile that were both real & scenario-based. So for Bristol, we changed the format of our exercise ‘The Three Cs’ (loosely based on ‘The Four C’s’ from every workshopper’s bible, Gamestorming) so that the output from the exercise was a story of adversity with an outcome. It morphed into a fun exercise that was much easier to explain to the group.
• There were too many up-front post-it ideas generated for a few of the exercises in London, so we limited the amount of ideas we asked people to generate in Bristol. This meant we could get further through a few set issues and delve into juicer conversations during the exercise. This, combined with breaking into two groups meant ‘The Squid’ exercise was much deeper and raised some interesting insights.

Again, we felt we had a great mix of people ranging from those working in digital inclusion, architecture (physical world!), web development and health. These varied backgrounds helped create some really interesting discussions and scenarios like ‘how do you create a hackable radio that someone with visual impairment can assemble’?

Thanks to Libby Miller, Laura Chilcott, Steve Maslin, Pete Britten, Tom Abba, Kevin O’Malley, Annie Taylor, Dave Martin and Kerry Bradshaw.

Thanks everyone for coming along and making it a great event, we’ll definitely be back to Bristol to see you all soon.

Now that we’ve collected two workshops worth of information & ideas, we’re starting to get an emerging picture of how we might best structure the book.

Next stop: Berlin!