Lessons Learned from Facilitation in Collaborative Design

The importance of a skilled facilitator in design meetings with users is often emphasized, but less is said about how to improve the facilitation process. This paper reports experiences and lessons learned from facilitation of cardbased sessions in three design cases through an analysis of two sessions with users, and one session with professional designers. The analysis showed that many alternatives were not documented in the sessions with users who designed primarily by talking, compared to the professional designers who primarily designed by placing cards. We propose that facilitation, in cases similar to those presented here, could be improved by suggesting alternatives and possible consequences, prompt the participants to explore the consequences, and graphic facilitation.