Our Customer was MUM, or more specifically the Student Life Department headed by Ellen Jones. The space of the Cafe in the main building has been a problem for the last years, since it somehow did not attract enough people despite the fact that it was situated in the center of the community in the mostly frequented are of the campus.
The Idea was to get input from students and other stakeholders about how the Cafe could attract them to come. Therefore we chose the format of a World Cafe Process to get as many ideas out as possible, but also to simply inspire people about the project and connect them with each other.
World Cafe is a participative Meeting design with "an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter." It invites everybody to bring their ideas to the table and through the design of the process connects the different ideas together.
The process taps into the collective Intelligence in a group and harnesses the power of conversations within a group.
We used this process several times before that successfully for bigger meetings (should be more then 15 people) and always had a great outcome.
The biggest challenge in my eyes is, to design the questions beforehand in a way that they are inspiring and "juicy" enough for people to get exited about their own ideas and still keep them on track with the overall theme.
How it works:
The room is set up with tables of 4 people. Each table has a big piece of paper on it and some markers. The process normally has 3 rounds. After every round, 3 of the 4 members move to another table with new members; 1 person stays behind and explains the ideas the previous group had. After 3 rounds, all the groups present back. (This is just a basic design and can be adopted for different groups or wished outcomes)
The Event
We promoted the Event beforehand to students, inviting them to come with the following text through e-mail and facebook:
A vital part of every community is a place where you can get together, have conversation, enjoy life, express your creativity, meet new friends and just enjoy.
The Vishwa Shanti Cafe could be a place like this. World Congress is working together with Student Life and Dean Ellen Jones to reopen the Cafe as a place where students can get together, meet friends, have fun, do work, meet new people, where the community connects back to itself, and life happens.
We want to get as much input as possible to know what you want to see happen in the cafe! What would inspire you to spend your time there? Wat should happen there? What could it look like?
Come and bring your ideas!!
At the Event itself we gave a short overview of how World Cafe works, and then went straight into the process. (One of the cool things about this process is, that you do not have to explain much before you can get started)
For the 3 rounds we had the following questions:
1. What would inspire you to spend your time here? What would make you feel welcome and good here?
2. What should happen here? For example: What do you want to do here? What events would you like to have here? What products or services do you want to see?
3. What would this space look like? How would you design it? Or, what design ideas do you have?
The Outcome
The Event totally inspired everybody who was present. We created 3 charts with about 50 Ideas for the Cafe on them, but also every group created post-it notes with the "most important" ideas. Also the administration representatives got very inspired and want to put more emphasis on the project and the best: one student is taking charge for the project now and is continuing to work on it and already got a work-study position assigned by the administration.
Yeay :)
P.s.:I also wanted to thank the World Congress crew and Steve Cooperman and everybody from the Bonnell Project for the support and help!
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