The Holographic Academy’s Envisioning Workshops are multi-day events that the Academy's design team puts on for agency partners. The workshops serve as a kickoff to the program and showcase our internal design process for problem solving in the Mixed Reality space.
The goal of a workshop is to shift the mindset from thinking about experiences within a fixed-screen to thinking about experiences that exist in 3-dimensions all around us. My role is to build the curriculum for the workshops as well as facilitate and lead the design exercises.
The Holographic Academy’s Envisioning Workshops are multi-day events that the Academy's design team puts on for agency partners. The workshops serve as a kickoff to the program and showcase our internal design process for problem solving in the Mixed Reality space.
The goal of a workshop is to shift the mindset from thinking about experiences within a fixed-screen to thinking about experiences that exist in 3-dimensions all around us. My role is to build the curriculum for the workshops as well as facilitate and lead the design exercises.
The workshops begin with breaking the participants into groups and an ideation exercise used to identify and address a business need that HoloLens and Mixed Reality can solve. In the past, we have used an abstract concept like Willy Wonka to mentally remove participants from their day-to-day work. This usually helps with removing any preconceived ideas and/or expectations people may have around holographic experiences and allows them to truly see where Mixed Reality can be of use for their clients.
To begin, we set aside technical limitations and implementation requirements and start with a post-it slam. Throughout the post-it slam, some common themes usually emerge and a grouping and filtering process takes shape. The idea grouping usually gives way to larger concepts that can potentially solve the business need.
Throughout the workshop we have “client” participation as well. The client, or Wonka in this case, is available to provide input from the business’ perspective on the scenarios the groups are trying to solve.
Once the groups have 1-3 solid ideas/concepts, we start layering in technical limitations and implementation requirements. To do this, we bring in subject matter experts from our platform teams to review each group’s set of ideas. The goal is to further distill down to a single concept to move forward with.
Once the groups have evaluated the feedback and selected an idea to move forward with, we begin paper prototyping. Being that this is envisioning for Mixed Reality, we don’t prototype in 2-dimensions, we use primitive shapes and materials to build objects in 3D. This gives us an idea of the scale of objects, people, and environments within our experiences and allows us to rapidly iterate before moving to pixels.
The final output is a theatrical presentation each group gives to the workshop as a whole illustrating their solution for the business need. By the end, participants have walked away with a process they can use as their own to help their clients envision new business opportunities in the mixed reality space.
Highlights of the 3 days distilled into a showcase piece for leadership and partners.