Iron unicorn: research, design, & win.
A two-hour workshop.
a half-day workshop.
Running a requirements workshop or design lab is an essential tool used to gain insight from both stakeholders and users. Blah blah blah. But shouldn't it be fun as well as fruitful? Behold! Iron Unicorn—a requirements session workshop combined with a little bit of Who’s Line is it Anyway and Iron Chef—to demonstrate behavioral tools, rhetorical tricks, and creative ways to elicit rather than gather requirements to get the best results. But in a game show format. Because, why not?
We start each episode of Iron Unicorn by soliciting brand, project, and target audience ideas from the crowd, then we mix them up to create the workshop’s unique challenge: A McDonalds dating site for the elderly? A Nike photo app for ebola patients? An Iron Man (the race not the Avenger) biometrics platform for bronies? The more absurd and fun, the better. Then we also pull unwitting volunteers from the crowd to serve as our stakeholders and users and run them through requirements gathering and user interviews before finally splitting the audience into teams and giving them an hour to create and pitch solutions to the workshop’s challenge. Oh, and we stick them with a surprise secret requirement: Must work in space; can’t use any written language; must support Arabic and Jabuti languages. The stakeholders and users then choose a winning team based on their ability to identify the sweet spot between the business requirements and user needs, whether or not their solution is on brand, and their concept’s novelty. We end by crowning the event’s iron unicorns and showering them with swag!
Three key takeaways
Participants will get an overview of good research and synthesis techniques that can immediately apply to their design process
Participants will be taken out of the comfort zones and forced to collaborate with friends and strangers in a rapid-fire format that encourages design thinking and quick brainstorming
Participants will get to practice playing the roles of business representatives, end users, and designers of all levels as their research, create, and present.
