And these were all steps they needed to follow, to come up with a well-defined strategy. It is an intense effort conducted by a small team where the results will set the direction for a product or service. After lunch, we review the solutions and decide which we prototype. The concept was stagnating amidst diverging viewpoints and a proposal had to be presented, so they needed to align as a team, quickly. On Monday, the Sprint Team (which most of the time is different than the one in the Framing) takes the time to understand the problem, context and all available information and insights. It acted as a team-building activity — all team members contributed ideas and felt that their input mattered. A one-day workshop with all relevant decision-makers to effectively establish the problem before the sprint, get the sponsor’s buy-in and ensure the recruitment of the right design sprint team; Four days instead of five! This is a preliminary step that we have created to ensure effective outcomes from a Design Sprint. The sprint enabled the team to reach a common understanding of requirements, and it helped grow the team’s confidence with the project. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Or alternatively, the problems we were tackling were too broad to allow a practical solution or too narrow to be worth the investment. Artefact One joined forces with landscape and hardscape architecture firm MAPP, who contacted us with a challenge: They were working on a large corporate project for a client where multiple stakeholders had different areas of influence. Thursday is about user testing, asking the most effective questions. Then, on Wednesday, you decide which sketches are the strongest. After the sprint, when presenting their concept, every design choice could be easily supported by solid arguments and traced back to the source, all because of the structured ideation in Day #2 and the shared understanding generated in Day #1. On Thursday, you build a realistic prototype. In the original process, half of Tuesday is reserved for Lightning Demos. This article is meant to shed some light on how introducing design sprints into the field of architecture and adapting them to the field, can lead to great results within a short period of time. With a small team and a clear schedule for the week, you’ll rapidly progress from problem to tested solution. Secondly, it would provide clear instructions for the team to brainstorm, all within their specific time constraints. Feel free to share your stories below or reach out to us personally if you’d like to share your thoughts about this. That is why it becomes critical to pick the right problem to solve to make this investment worthwhile. We encourage everyone in the group to assume a role and get their hands dirty (yes, that includes any senior executives in the room). Moment of truth. MAPP produced a lot of varied ideas in very little time — just what they needed! Problem Framing is a half to a full-day workshop that involves the main stakeholders, typically exec. We had 3 days at our disposal, so an idea sparked up: what if we start a design sprint? Besides time savings, another (quite significant) gain is that people get to sketch with a fresh mind (it’s still morning) and because they just got inspired after the demos the solutions tend to be more creative. Besides team bonding, the team will develop a shared sense of ownership which will help to carry over the results (as opposed to a prototype a designer or agency built). The Design Sprint framework was developed at Google, to align teams under a shared vision with clearly defined goals and deliverables. 3) Learning through rough prototyping, experimenting, and visualization. We decided that the benefits trumped the downsides. A design sprint is a flexible product design framework that serves to maximize the chances of making something people want. We are building Empathy with the User right from the first day of the sprint, by embedding research insights or existing data into the Understand and Define phase. The rest of Tuesday afternoon, a solid 1.5 hours, will be dedicated to storyboarding. 2) Empathetic collaboration, with the customers and with the cross-functional teams. This is especially important in more hierarchical cultures. We refined the second day of the design sprint by kicking off with ideation and ending it with a cohesive storyboard. Popularized by Jake Knapp in the book “Sprint”, the design sprint framework is now being adopted by companies big and small, and from all over the world within different industries. With only a “minor” downside: we only had 3 days and we wouldn’t be able to do quick validation with users, an essential part of design sprints. We structured the morning discussions leading to the Sprint Goal into an activity called Lightning Talks, where the team shares their points of view on the problem at hand and reviews the Design Sprint Brief. WHY THE DESIGN SPRINT APPROACH. On Monday, you create a map of the problem. We are excited to answer this question together with MAPP, so we’re going to do a brainstorm and write an article about our conclusions as a follow-up…. So, after a quick introduction over lunch, Artefact One was invited to start right away and we did a kick-off that very afternoon. A design sprint consists of … Thirdly, it would follow the design thinking approach to problem-solving — a step by step format that starts with understanding the project scope and ends with quickly testing a solution. The way we adapted it to fit the architecture workflow and our client’s timeline looked something like this: In our adaptation, we skipped days 4 & 5, mainly for two reasons: Can you really have a testing day with users for an architecture design sprint?