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I attended the very first ever Design Jam on Saturday, 20 November 2010. 10 teams were set a challenge and given 8 hours to produce a prototype each that solves the problem.  All my life I have been designing based on my creative skills and 6th sense of what it is a client really wants. With experience design maturing into a recognisable and successful practice this kind of ‘design’ session highlights gaps in the level of experience design being practised. It therefore also allows a bunch of enthusiastic designers, developers and artists to learn from each other in order to provide better service to their client and raise the profile of experience design.

With only 8 hours (plus a lunch break) there really wasn’t alot of time to mess about. Leisa Reichelt, in her blog, mentions some good tips on how to get quickly to iterating and forming a design in time short sessions like this. Here is a summary of those points from her blog:

1. Spend less time choosing your idea and more time defining it. Specifically, what problem are you solving?
2. Define your audience by understanding the important behavioural characteristics.
3. Get sketching! Generate and evaluate lots of design solutions before you start wireframing
4. A group is a resource and a liability (user your numbers, appoint a facilitator)
5. Pitch clearly and persuasively
   

Here are am with our team "MindStorm" discussing our ideas with Leisa Reichelt

MindStorm - Sketching the ideas for paper prototyping

Here is the MindStorm App (my design!) being discussed - we were the only ones to get it this finished!

The MindStorm team:

• Marcin Grodzicki, @3marcin
• Eewei Chen (me) @ultraman
• Kuba Kucharski, @83tb
• Keng @kengggg @kengggg
• Tom @whoojemaflip

Read more about the day here:

• http://www.designjams.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://johnnyholland.org/2010/11/20/design-jam-london-1/
• http://www.disambiguity.com/designjam1/