Our Workshopping Approach
Shared understanding
beats individual knowledge
Keeping up with advances in computing and digital technology is difficult and time consuming, yet leaders across all sectors - public, private, voluntary and academic - are now frequently required to pursue strategies and make decisions in which digital technologies play a crucial role.
Added to which, these technologies often interact with each other in complex ways, and produce unintended, often poorly understood, downstream effects and burdens which have to be accounted for. And even if a CIO, or other leader, understands enough to set a good direction, they are often isolated and unable to conduct conversations with fellow senior managers or staff with enough common understanding of the issues - there is a collective lack of language and conceptual knowledge that prevents clear and aligned decision-making, and the ability to carry things out.
This is the challenge that Unfolding works hard to address.
We design engaging, collaborative workshops that take participants from a basic understanding of a topic, through to having a good grasp of the concepts, experience of using or seeing the underlying technology in action, and sufficient language and understanding to confidently discuss the implications and opportunities that are presented.
Our objective is for everyone who participates in one of our workshops to be able to hold more substantial and more fruitful discussions about digital technology with others.
Design Principles
Each Unfolding Workshop is a meticulously designed and unique experience. We embody our design principles in each one we deliver:
Our objective is to achieve better dialogue.
Make sure everyone is involved.
Lift everyone to a common level of knowledge.
Give everyone a hands-on experience.
Make the invisible visible.
Make the abstract tangible.
Use playful dynamics to connect and help people remember.
Maintain attention by having short activities and frequent breaks.
Breaks are opportunities to relax, but also to talk and practice.
Keeping to time should be a fun and shared responsibility.
Extend the experience outside the workshop itself.
Our workshop experiences can be conducted in-person, online or hybrid.
All our workshops are conducted in small groups of between 4 and 6 people, either sat or stood around circular tables or in online breakout rooms. Whether online or in-person, participants are encouraged to use their own internet-connected devices to interact with the material and with each other within the context of the workshop.
Who are Unfolding workshops for?
We have worked with many different groups of people, and always tailor our workshops to the learning objectives of each group. Here are some common groups:
Senior Management - our workshops are suited to helping the leadership of large and medium-sized organisations to build collective understanding around emerging digital technologies and the opportunities and risks they represent.
Government & the Public Sector - a relentless wave of technology-driven transformation is being felt across our public sector institutions, and the ability of organisations, both local and national, to manage this change relies on shared knowledge and understanding of the issues and opportunities that are shaping it.
Academia - we have experience in helping academic researchers understand digital technologies and related concepts in order to bring more insight and balance to their work, especially in the humanities, social sciences and business studies.
Project Teams and Departments - our workshops are great for building digital capacity within teams and departments, both for exploring directly relevant technologies and concepts, but also as part of general learning or 'away days' as the workshops build collaborative learning skills which teams can apply in their regular work.
Conference Delegates - we design hands-on interactive sessions for delegates at conferences and technology festivals, including with partners and/or sponsors to highlight new knowledge and approaches.
Communities - we believe that there is a pervasive lack of understanding of digital technologies, and the ability to think and discuss issues that relate to them. We aim to play a part in addressing this by providing free workshops to community groups funded by our commercial work.
Novices and Experts - most of our participants have at least some understanding of the subject, however often lack the foundational knowledge and breadth of perspective to form truly independent critical opinions of their own, and communicate them well. However, our workshops are modular and we always adapt the content to ensure that everyone is included and able to participate fully, no matter their prior knowledge.
Costs
Costs for one of our workshops range from £280+VAT for a 2 hour session for up to 6 participants, to upwards of £5700+VAT for a full day for 60 people.
Costs depend on a number of factors, including venue location, duration, number of participants, bespoke modifications to the core material, etc. We are fully open with our model, and will break down your requirements in a full quote on application.
We also ask clients for a voluntary additional contribution to fund an equivalent workshop delivered to a community in their locality, not necessarily on the same topic, but to build wider understanding of the positive uses of technology.
Workshop Topics
Our roster of workshop topics is ever changing and we frequently review and add new ones, but here is a representative list of the areas we cover:
Smart Places
What are ‘smart cities’ and what's so smart about them? Why does this matter? What about other places and geographies? How can citizens be included?
City-wide Sensing & The Internet of Things
What are city-wide IoT networks? How do they work? What can they be used for? And by whom? How can they be made more open to capture and share additional value?
Location and the ‘Physical Web’
What is the 'physical web'? How do we know when things near to us want to communicate? What kinds of thing can we do with them?
Data & Artificial Intelligence
How does AI work? What can we actually do with it, in the context of places? How expensive is it? How is it already changing the way we live? How should we think about ethics?
Digital & Data Rights
What rights and protections do citizens have? How should these rights be upheld by authorities and stakeholders? How can communities assert their digital and data rights?
Service Design & Digital Production
How are different digital services and products actually made? What skills are involved? How are these processes organised? What language do producers use, and how do they think?
Innovation Processes and Culture
What is 'innovation', and how does it differ in different contexts? How can places, organisations, and the people that constitute them, become more creative, productive and innovative?
Digital Economy
What do we mean by the 'digital economy'? What are the 'digital industries'? What role do they play in the wider economy, nationally and internationally? How important are they to local Industrial Strategies, and how can they be grown and leveraged?
Digital Ecosystems
How are digital ecosystems different to traditional ‘markets’? How can we analyse them? How do trends and other factors impact on them? How do we identify opportunities to create new value?
Design Thinking for Digital Places
How do we apply Design Thinking to place challenges? How can we do this inclusively? How can we experiment with potential solutions? How do we build compelling business cases and pitch them?