Story:
21st Century Play Dates: How USC Annenberg’s Innovation Lab brings together diverse communities to provoke innovation and unleash human potential.

What is a Think & Do?

AIL Research Fellow and Clinical Professor Susan Resnick West and AIL Creative/ Research Director Erin Reilly designed the Think & Do (T&D) Process to foster an open space for people of varied disciplines and backgrounds to get to know one another, learn from one another, and create together. The process is an act of “Thinkering” (4) or thinking about something by tinkering with objects relating to the innovation under consideration. Although each T&D Workshop is unique, all have two broad goals:

• Create communities of interdisciplinary innovators
• Generate innovations on a specific product or process

Each workshop is different, but all T&Ds are based on 5 design principles: Provocative questions, Phenomenal participants, Play matters, Place matters, and the view that innovation and change are a Process.

Design Priniple: Provocative Questions:

 The unique time and space that each Think & Do offers – away from work and void of hierarchy – allows participants to ponder critical questions. Much like the process of scenario planning utilized by Shell International and the World Economic Forum, our stakeholders-turned-play-partners are invited to suspend all disbelief as they scour their collective imaginations in response to our provocative yet grounded questions.

These questions provide a framework for the day, a loose structure that sets boundaries and brings focus.

For example, in our TV News T&D, we asked participants: “If the daily news program were being invented today, what would it look like?”

Then we asked them about the trends in news consumption and information dissemination. We asked them to think as consumers, not producers. We asked them to look five to seven years into the future, a time horizon that’s “short enough to create scenarios that are probable, but long enough for participants to imagine that important changes with an impact on the future business can take place." (5)  And then, finally, we asked them to lay out their re-invention plans.

The provocative question encourages participants to rig their collective wisdom and minds in dreaming up innovative and realistic alternatives.

Design Principle: Phenomenal Participants

Diversity, the sine quo non of creativity and innovation, doesn’t happen by accident. We build diverse T&D participant groups by inviting people based on their expert knowledge, their workforce role (such as roles in production, marketing, finance, etc), their level of engagement with the public, and their access to and participation in other innovation. We seek a blend of gender, race and age. We mix students and faculty from multiple disciplines with experts from multiple industries. If we’re talking about the future of the evening news, for example, we include not only content providers but also platform technologists and business executives.

To facilitate project gestation, we include people and organizations that have access to resources  which may form the basis of an innovation. But we also make sure to include “wild cards,” or folks with interests entirely separate from or even competing with most other participants’ interests. If we are developing technology, for example, we may include people with humanities or arts backgrounds. When innovating branding, we invite “ad-busters.”

Often participants do not know each other when they arrive, so we spend time at the beginning of each day on introductions linking the participants to the topic of the day. For example, in the Future of Play T&D, we encouraged everyone to bring their favorite childhood toy and share their most meaningful play experience.

Design Principle: Play Matters 

Play fosters innovative thinking, (6) and physical activity promotes mental acuity. (7) Paradoxically, hard work can sabotage success by overpowering a problem rather than actually solving it. (8) We build on these facts as we design our Think & Do Workshops.  

By “play,” we mean any activity in which the imagination gets involved. Because of the profound effect of physical engagement on mental acuity, we ground the play in activities that involve other senses: acting, drawing, building, or singing. We ban PowerPoint presentations. 

Play relaxes participants, opens space for ideation, and promotes connectivity. It makes people smile, and according to Martin Seligman, “positive mood produces broader attention ... more holistic thinking.” (9)

When our T&D participants play together, they get to know each other and come to trust each other. We can’t expect in a six-hour day for complex projects to fully emerge. By the end of the day, though, relationships solidify, and concrete projectsbegin to incubate.

Design Principle: Place Matters

The lab provides participants a safe and supportive space where it's "OK to play." A Think & Do is meant to be an innovation sabbatical, and we make sure space and time is available so participants can grab a chair and a few other people and discover common interests.

We also fill the space with objects, texts, and sounds that serve as an information-rich, interactive, thought-provoking cocoon from which participants hatch collaborative projects and research. And rather than having the place be in only one room, we encourage movement and action by offering multiple places for activities, giving us opportunities to re-stage and create a variety of environments to excite the senses. The unstructured moments of a Think & Do are just as important as the structured, and we want participants to be able to wander and browse whenever they have a few minutes to themselves.

As the Chief Culture Officers (10) of each Think & Do, we design the spaces to support a “culture of innovation.” Like the learning environment described by Kolb and Kolb, we strive for “a hospitable, welcoming space characterized by mutual respect. It needs to be safe and supportive, but also challenging.” (11) Immersing participants in this culture allows them to free their thinking and become outrageous.

We do everything we can to make the environment comfortable and to prepare participants for the experience. Nevertheless, to be frank, some participants leave early because the event is outside their comfort zone. We’re not bothered by this. We are developing the sourdough starter for innovation culture, a collaborative group who can ignite others.

If a culture of innovation can be understood both as “the shared beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a group and … as the growth of biological material in a nutrient-rich medium,” (12) we take care to provide a nutrient rich environment in an effort to grow an ecosystem.

Design Principle: Process

We believe that innovations emerge and take root in iterative stages. Agile in our process, we encourage T&D participants to re-work and combine good ideas until they form prototypes. Then, with time, the prototypes can evolve into reliable, great, and eventually world-changing products or services. That evolution takes time, so we treat a Think & Do Workshop not as a means to create an innovation but rather as an opportunity to set a process in motion.

Throughout the process, we encourage rapid prototyping and have frequently observed participants in discussions share: "Oh, that idea's already happened!" or "Here's why that idea won't work...” Part of the value of the diverse ecosystem of innovators at a Think & Do is that it allows for this rapid feedback process.

We prime our participants for the process with a provocative question and a short briefing book full of quotes and statistics relating to the question. In the workshop, we first come to consensus about the provocative question, agreeing to frequently modify it as the day unfolds. We then focus on ideation, improving ideas, pitching, draft prototyping, and collaboration matchmaking. Finally, we incubate the new collaborations, by hosting follow-up workshops, making introductions, and contributing resources when we can.

We work with our Think & Do participants not just while they’re sprinting through six hours of engagement with a provocative question. We meet mile after mile as they run their marathon, offering advice, encouragement, and bananas for sustenance.

Doing

In a one day, six-hour workshop, the “Do” part of the Think & Do is the hardest to design.  However, it is the most important part of moving away from the “all talk, no action” often ascribed to this type of event. The “doing” breaks down the barriers, allowing information to flow throughout the ecosystem.

At the core of our methodology are short creative actions, which we refer to as “spark” activities, designed to springboard creativity. These often require groups to “build” something – to tell a story, create a metaphor, design a model, or prototype an actual product. While “sparking,” the tenor of the group switches; new voices are heard; new ideas are born; laughter fills the air; body language relaxes; and new patterns emerge.

The Think & Do Journey

Over the past two years, we have hosted four T&Ds: The Future of Play, Second Screen: So What?, The Future of the Evening News, and Defining Transmedia Branding. To give you a flavor for the process, we discuss two of these in detail below. We’ll call on all four of the workshops as we discuss the lessons learned.

The Future of Play

Just as the digital age has changed the way we work, it has also changed the way children play. Questions like What holds children’s attention?, How does “digital play” impact children’s cognitive development?, How will stories be told in the future?, How will lessons be learned? and others continue to perplex educators, media researchers, and toy makers alike.

Wishing to explore these topics further, we set about developing our first T&D. We settled on the following provocative question:

“What constitutes compelling play and new narratives for the 21st century?“

Participants

To ensure an eclectic mix of participants, we invited the founders of The Alchemists (a transmedia storytelling company that produces and manages stories across multiple media platforms), the head of educational product development for a major technology company, a specialist in 3D graphics, game designers, and a handful of students and faculty with interests in transmedia storytelling, media innovation, the impact of media on physical spaces, learning, child development, peer interaction, and engagement between children and adults.

We then set about designing the day.

Room curation

We carefully curated the room. Each corner represented a different form of play. We moved from art to physical play, from fantasy to construction, from physical to cerebral. Each corner contained toys, books, games and other artifacts of contemporary play. We surmised that connecting the day to the participants’ personal experience would be key, so, as way of introduction, each participant arrived carrying an object reminiscent of their own early childhood play experience.

Flow of the day

Throughout the day, participants moved around the room, sometimes in unstructured activities and other times in activities designed to synthesize what they had learned. Among the items that most attracted the group’s attention was Flotsam, a Caldecott Award winning wordless picture book beautifully illustrated with pictures of underwater life. The book chronicles the travels of a magical underwater camera as it washes up from shore to shore.

This mesmerizing book attracted attention as several people, stimulated by the exquisite graphics, began to create their own stories. Bringing their varied expertise to bear, the group began to imagine ways to morph this asset into compelling 21st century play. Excitement grew as a multi-organizational subset of the T&D participants committed to carry a project forward.

Developing the product and the network

One of the original T&D participants mentioned that she knew someone at Flotsam’s publishing company. A core group from the original T&D met with that person, who, in turn, introduced the Lab to David Wiesner, the book’s author. Mr. Wiesner, excited by the possibility of expanding the Flotsam world through new forms of media, admired the group’s eclectic expertise and their desire to bring a new generation of readers to Flotsam.

Expanding the network

As interest in the project grew, the Lab began developing additional workshops  and a network of industry professionals, faculty, and students, with the goal of deconstructing the book and thinking about it as a transmedia story and play experience. The network not only included David Weiser and his editor but also marine biologists from The Wrigley Institute for Environment Studies, engineers from the Viterbi School of Engineering, a variety of students from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the School of Cinematic Arts, the Rossier School of Education, as well as transmedia storytelling and production professionals, including members from The Alchemists.

The product

Working in collaboration, the project team has brainstormed, researched, and rapid-prototyped numerous transmedia extensions of Flotsam. In its current iteration, the transmedia experience extends from the printed book to a dynamic book (or “d-book”) for the iPad that invites children to explore their immediate environment and the larger world using integrated interactive tools, to record and remix their own stories, and to share those stories with their friends and families. In addition to the d-book, the transmedia experience includes collectable “Explorer Cards” that elaborate on elements of the book’s illustrations and related scientific concepts and interact with the d-book through augmented reality. Play with the explorer cards can also happen outside of the d-book through a multi-player card game.

The project is currently in Beta development and testing and the team envisions this experiment to release this Spring 2013 and extend beyond this one story to offering a transmedia story and play platform for multiple stories to come.

The backstory

The story above is true, but, it doesn’t tell the whole story. This project began when a major toy company approached the Lab looking to extend the use of an existing property. The company, tracking the expansion of transmedia storytelling saw potential for expanding its market. Partnering with the company, the T&D Team designed a one-day workshop.

The impasse and Switzerland

After settling on a provocative question, we hit an impasse with the toy company: Who would own the product of the workshop?

As is frequently the case, conflict begets clarity and solidifies identity. We never envisioned subcontracting our services to one corporation, unless it was for a specific directed research grant, and this was not that. Our interests lie in “open space” collaboration, pushing the boundaries of innovation, collaborating across multiple entities. We began to see ourselves as “Switzerland” ensuring that everything remained open for exploration and co-creation, especially with regards to our T&D process and outputs.

By the time the original sponsor found our conditions untenable, we considered this too important an area of research and design to cancel. The original sponsor declined to be part of our new approach (partially due to ownership questions and partially due to their own internal re-organization), so the Lab funded and organized the entire event.

The first USC Think & Do shifted focus from thinking to doing, and, as we hoped it would, spawned a very real and so far very successful project: Flotsam, an immersive transmedia play experience, as well as new publications on the practices of designing Transmedia Play experiences. And, most importantly, a subset of the original Think & Do participants continue to carry the project forward today, and a vibrant network of collaborators has formed around the project.

The Future of the Evening News

As a Communication and Journalism school, Annenberg is curious about the future of the news business, so we figured we should organize a Think & Do around the following provocative question:

"If the television news show were reinvented today, what would it look like and how would we engage the audience?"

When we first shared the Workshop’s name, The Future of the Evening News, outside our design group, someone asked if it was an oxymoron. When we heard that question, we knew we had identified a provocative topic. In the end, a series of provocative questions centering on a reinvented news show shaped the T&D.

Design team

This Think & Do was the first time we designed in conjunction with a subject matter expert who had no prior experience with innovation or large group change processes. Gabriel Kahn, a member of our faculty and former Wall Street Journal bureau chief had a deep understanding of the state of the news industry but was skeptical about the value of a T&D. In the beginning, he would have preferred a good old fashion conference. After a few intense design meetings, he began to see the value of the T&D for shifting the conversation and breaking down barriers between key constituents in the “news ecosystem.” In fact, Gabe began convincing other skeptics that the Think & Do process “allowed for the best way to come at the question from a number of angles and to not let assumptions lead the day, but rather have the needs that we need to serve emerge through the process.”

Gabe’s extensive network of news professionals brought a wide array of phenomenal participants, including old and new media executives, content providers, technology specialists, and newscasters, as well as USC Journalism faculty and students.

“Sparking”

The morning began with individual introductions on how they choose to consume the news and a brief activity asking participants what’s working and what isn’t about the evening news. Following these activities, we began to play. We asked participants to focus on the end user’s experience. We assigned groups of participants typical “habitats” for news consumption, including a bus station, an office, a kitchen, and a living room. The space had been carefully curated to include each of these habitats. So, for example, a living room was set up by borrowing sofas and chairs from the Dean’s foyer. Role playing different consumers within these habitats, participants created skits representing the likely evolution of future news consumption.

The product

After a day that included role-play, an activity asking participants to mock-up a re-imagined daily news program,a period of unstructured networking, and some great rapid-fire product pitches from participants, the T&D yielded a collaboration between USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a major broadcaster, a leading network technology company, and the Innovation Lab. The project seeks to marry ICT’s holographic avatar technology with the broadcaster’s news assets to deliver a personalized video news experience. 

The backstory

Again, the above story makes the process seem smoother than it was. A few days before the event, we realized we were understaffed to facilitate the event, move props, and hang flip charts. Fortunately, the semester had just begun, and Susan was able to recruit a few of her students. Having a detailed facilitators’ guide helped the students get up to speed quickly.In one activity, we assigned people from similar industries to the same group, and the result was a grumpy group of participants who let us know they came to meet a diverse group of people, not more like themselves.   

The news habitat “spark” activity had a slow start. As it turns out, news folks tend to be skeptics, and it took time to cajole some of the participants to attempt the first “habitat” activity. We could have used an experienced facilitator in each group to guide the participants. Luckily, there were some “positive deviants” in the living room habitat who broke the ice by presenting a skit that had us all on the floor laughing.   

Toward the end of the day, time became very tight, but, fortunately, Gabe Kahn, our subject matter expert, and Jon Taplin, the Lab’s director knew many of the participants and did some critical matchmaking.

A number of other projects might have emerged, but we didn’t have the staffing to manage them. A listserv started by one of the participants got a lot of play for a few weeks following the event but died soon after.

We have learned an enormous amount from our initial Think & Do’s. We had moments of great success and humbling moments as well. And we feel confident that our future events will benefit greatly from our experience.