Community-led design innovation to evolve live events

Beginning within the 'big', or wider circle of stakeholders, we worked closely with the TEDx leadership team in the early stages to align on key objectives and to identify prospective co-designers — individuals in the community who had a common interest in improving the TEDx experience, as well as a diverse mix of lived experience and professional expertise.

A 'small' circle of co-designers was intentionally limited to thirteen individuals who joined a series of intimate, connective and generative activities.

We brought together a cross-organisational support team of six, representing community experience, operations, marketing, partnerships, and strategic design to connect, coach and coordinate the efforts of the ‘small’ and ‘big’ circles as well as each other. 

Intending to streamline communication and building capability in this team, we created digital and physical channels for peer to peer knowledge sharing throughout the project. Compiling the qualitative and quantitative artefacts of TEDx’s decade of event experiences into a CX immersion space brought data to life, and allowed this team to contextualise their experience of attending and creating events with that of others.

We hosted this team in a series of CX open studios throughout the project to understand invaluable context outside of the co-design workshops. These open studio forums allowed learning with the TEDx team, research immersion and dialogue building on organisational and professional knowledge and identified gaps where discovery and design activities would add the most value in the following stages. The shared decision making of these sessions allowed us to rapidly focus efforts in the design phase for the highest impact.

Making things together is a critical step in moving ideas from individual theory to comparable, sharable reality. In a workshop environment co-designers were tasked with imagining and sharing possible futures — leaping from conceptual to tangible, individual to collective; multiple times. 

We designed activities that allowed co-designers to express and combine ideas in a variety of formats; incorporating movement, paper prototyping, visual and creative expression, alongside more usual written and verbal individual and group tasks. 

We created the conditions for these activities to occur in a psychologically and physically safe environment by designing a culture of hospitality and welcome, and intentional non-design time to onboard, brief and debrief key sessions. 

When our co-designers gathered in-person for the first time, united by their common interest in improving the TEDx experience, the room was a buzz, as their diverse mix of lived experience and professional expertise came together in a series of divergent and convergent activities.

These activities included building an understanding of others perspectives and experiences, surfacing key elements of past experiences and ideas for future ones, catalysing new possibilities by combining ideas with others, co-creating shared visions of the future, negotiating the finer detail through physical making, planning in small groups how to represent their shared vision with others, and finally sharing and contributing to cooperative dialogue to exchange information and build relationships between the ideas presented. In this final phase, dialogue revealed rich themes which continued into follow up sessions, the threads of potential containing invaluable insight about community expectations beneath each of the three visions for future experiences created.

Buoyed by the richness of themes and insights taking shape in the final activities of the design phase, our team turned their attention to synthesis. 

This process was cumulative; initially capturing, sorting and representing the visual, written and performed descriptions of thousands of experiences, ideas and opinions in over 90 hours of community engagement into recognisable outputs for stakeholders. 

From this starting point, we integrated bigger themes and individual threads of these ideas into a long working list of focus areas and insights, presenting those in draft form to the support team for their advice and feedback. 

The final report highlighted the evidence behind each insight from the multitude of visual, audio and written outputs provided by co-designers, providing a clear and concise set of focus areas and insights to inform TEDx’s annual strategic planning. The report continues to act as a key reference point for decision making, and provide a platform for community voices and contributions to influence TEDx’s strategic choices.

As TEDx’s annual strategy started to take shape, our focus turned to engagement and designing artefacts to share and embed project outcomes - continuing our work to build relationships between community and purpose.

A central event in this handover phase was the showcase, celebrating the contributions of co-designers and support team, and hosting an open forum in partnership with TEDx’s leadership team to continue the work of designing and refining the strategy together. 

In this intimate workshop setting with familiar participants, we were able to go beyond the first or second iteration of co-design to support TEDx to ask the deeper, harder questions - the answers to which generated artefacts and deepened social connection between community and organisation, to continue to support the translation of vision to action in the coming year. 

The approach centred on engaging a vibrant and diverse community to co-design possible futures and we achieved that outcome. TEDx have a new focus and are equipped to make decisions on opportunities for the future.