Area designers with different levels of expertise and experience gathered to play.
They were randomly assigned to a team representing one of 15 divisions of the fictional company, Crazy Corporation. Each team was provided a file box full of arbitrary items — a paintbrush, toy army men and a plastic funnel in one; neoprene tubing, cheap sunglasses, and soda straws in another — but that didn’t matter. Neither did it matter that half way into the game, Crazy Corp’s engineering team insisted that their shiny new high-tech material (aka aluminum foil) be incorporated into the design or, that their marketing team introduced a specific market segment to focus on in the eleventh hour.
What mattered is that over the course of two hours, each team enthusiastically tackled the challenge of creating a prototype. They felt how inspiration comes from unlikely sources when biases are checked at the door, how progress comes in fits and spurts, and the challenge of concisely representing their creation to company decision makers — in this case, a panel of judges. They did this with limited resources, a tight timeline and last-minute pivots.
This is the reality of today’s hyper-active business environment where a bias toward action is favored over perfection. Refinement is always possible, but rapid-prototyping increases the number of options to consider. And options make it possible to focus; to choose what to refine further through testing and vetting.
Three products were judged to be the best but, in the end, all participants were winners. They left the event with a new-found confidence in their ability to tackle seemingly intractable problems.
Our team of strategists and designers embrace “Box of Crazy” every day. We get our clients engaged with their organizational knowledge through Design Thinking. We do conventional and unconventional exercises from customer journey mapping to LEGO Serious Play to weeklong curated learning journeys where we take a group of clients to another city to have firsthand experiences and discussions with leading thinkers and practitioners.
Design Thinking is our superpower.
We exercise it regularly by applying Agile UX principles. This enables us to unbox and sort through client challenges to first prototype and test, and then refine to deliver exceptional digital products and user experiences that are both pragmatic and elegant.
UX Capabilities at Openfield
User Research & Testing
Focus all stakeholders and team members on what really matters to your users. Make more confident decisions about what you deploy and when.
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Align product features and flows with the real-world wants and needs of student and instructor users.
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Create and validate bar-setting user experiences that will endear students and instructors to your product.
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