Recipe step number
Day 2, Activity 1
Description
Borrow inspiration from other related worlds
Reading Time
6 mins
Activity time
1-2 hours
Recipe: Design Sprint (Day 2)
- Lightning Demos
- Divide or Swarm
- 4-Step Sketch
Materials
- Access to Mural (digital whiteboard)
- Microsoft Teams (for group video calls)
Related Mural templates:
Design Sprint complete 5-day canvas
More resources
- links etc go here
Overview
Why do this activity?
Lightning Demos are a fast-track to great ideas!
Before the team tries to come up with creative solutions, everyone searches for inspiring real-world examples to share with each other.
Here's one of our very own video's from the Advance Concepts™ studio. It guides you through the entire Lightning Demos (AKA Related Worlds) process.
Key Tips
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- Find your favorite inspiring solutions
- Pull together a 2 minute demo to inspire the team and highlight important components for the solution.
- Capture big ideas in a central place (whiteboard or mural)
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- If you want your solution to solve challenges effectively, leverage things that are already doing well. It’s a fast-track to great ideas.
- It’s easy for people to choose the easy ones, “Apple” or “Amazon”. We encourage going deeper and beyond. Ask the team to be more specific. Have them look for unexpected inspiration.
- It’s important that inspiration topics are very specific – that way it’s can literally be plugged-in to the prototype. (e.g., “the way Google Maps shows nearby interest points” – not just “Google”)
- Ask, what’s the big idea with your inspiration? What’s the most important component we might want to take forward?
How to do this activity
Allow 1 hour
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- The facilitator instructs the group to:
- Re-read the Killer Questions (to remember what we are trying to solve)
- Try to think of things (products, companies, apps, services, experiences, tools etc...) that have solved similar problems in an interesting (and successful) way.
- Set the timer for 10 mins
- Participants can quietly search online and find 1-2 examples each
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- Upload screenshots/images of your example into the shared workspace
- Write a few key details:
- The big idea you want to share (e.g. if you're example is Airbnb - tell us why! Do you want to show how the booking system works? Is it the beautiful photos? Or perhaps it's the customer support features. What's the big idea the team can be inspired by?)
- Add a few extra notes to explain exactly what you were inspired by
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- Set the timer for 2 mins
- Each person shares their example
- They focus their presentation on the relevant, interesting, useful ideas
- ... and refer back to the Killer Questions this example could help us answer
Here's an example of a Lightning Demo board from a real Design Sprint. The examples are diverse and inspire the group to think of creative, unexpected ways to approach solutions.
