The “What if Lab” workshop at OuiShareFest 2015
What if… we started redesigning society with people. That is what we did in a creative and collaborative workshop. We proposed 3 interesting and quite crazy options and the group’s mission was to work out a desirable solution in only one hour and create a simple poster to make people join in.
During Fest
There was a great diversity of participants, some where totally comfortable with facing unusual situations and cooperating to find creative solutions, others seemed a little shy at the beginning at least.
For practical reasons the workshop was limited to 45 people and it was full. The participants were coming from all over Europe : UK, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy,…
What happened
The 3 animators (Jennifer Leblond, Louis-David Benyayer and Jean-Luc Wingert) managed 2 or 3 groups each and presented 3 different “What ifs” :
- What if the cities were limited to 5000 people only.
- What if there was no more internet.
- What if there was no more drinking water but only fruit juice and vodka.
The workshop sequence is one hour long with 6 different steps. At some specific moments the participants picked cards. Strangely enough, two different groups picked the same “Event” card that inspired them in their solution, this was quite unexpected, this card read “Huge flooding: crocodiles come up the sewers and scare the population to death…”
@OuiShare Fest 15
Copyright Sandrine Landrix
Copyright Sandrine Landrix
Results
The atmosphere and energy were great and the final posters of the 7 groups were very creative. More important, the participants had the opportunity to share around some serious topics and notions in a relaxed and playful way.
What’s next
You want to organize your own workshop, great !
You can :
- download the Toolkit V2 on the website (www.whatiflab.org/). It includes the workshop description and basic cards to print yourself, and it’s free.
- buy the card deck, also on the website (www.whatiflab.org/). You’ll find out it’s much more convenient, especially if you run a workshop with several groups in parallel as we did at the OuiShare Fest.
