Imagination Studio

Imagination Market toured Jbeil and Baakline on the weekend of the 7th and 8th of July, and acted as a testing platform for Imagination Studio ideas. 5 market booths, 5 activities, addressing 5 barriers to social integration in Lebanon. Imaginers described the weekend as: thrilling, touching, satisfying, exhausting, and fun! Youth we interacted with were very engaged. Most wanted to try out all five activities, and took something new away with them about social integration in Lebanon; a question, a different perspective, a message, a story to share with others… This is a selecion of photos to illustrate the energy of the two days.

We would like to thank Aie Serve, and Byblos and Baakline municipalities for all their support.

On the 29th of June 2012, Joanna Choukeir delivered a talk at Beirut Design Week, sharing the work to date on Imagination Studio, and the plans for Imagination Market.

Beirut Design Week is organised by MENA Design Research Centre and is “dedicated to promoting all Lebanese designers, who have been playing a vital role in the formation of the city’s contemporary design identity and culture.”

Tangible mockups and rehearsals at Prototyping – the fifth Imagination Studio workshop, where teams met in pairs and prototyped the entire user journey of their idea’s market booth. The came up with the seller’s ‘pick-up-lines’, activity dynamics/logistics/props, team roles at the booth, worst-case-scenario considerations, and evaluation plan. Once the market activities were prototyped, teams took turns role playing as youth visiting the booths, testing the ideas, and suggestions iterations based on the experience they had. Thank you nSITE for the creative space and the memories it holds of our very first Imagination Studio Ideation workshop!

Resourceful connections at Asset Mapping – the fourth Imagination Studio workshop, where teams met individually, down-sized their change journey strategies to small ideas for piloting, and pinned down all the assets required to achieve the pilot test: time, tools, information, budget, connections, skills and venue. Among all 17 Imaginers who attended, we were able to identify an access point to every single thing we felt was needed to achieve the pilot in July. What is the pilot? An Imagination Bus which transports an Imagination Market to two regions in Lebanon over the weekend of 7-8 July. Imagination Market features 5 pop-up booths, one for each team, selling their innovative ideas by inviting youth to interact with them there and then! More about Imagination Bus and Market here. Workshop stats: 7.5 hours, 17 Imaginer, 1 bus, 5 market booths, 70 assets mapped, 50 actions, 67.5 MB of Skype data, 5 pilot ideas. Thank you Beirut DC for the beautiful rustic space you offered us for this workshop.

Clever change journeys at Develop – the third Imagination Studio which aimed to help the five teams make their ideas more detailed and tangible, and to build an effective strategy around them. Ideas were developed along a thorough ‘change journey’ to ensure they align with behaviour change goals for more youth to integrate with others outside their social group. The change journey for each idea went through:

- Promote: how do users find out about it

- Incentivise: how do we motivate to get involved

- Sign up: how do they logistically prepare themselves to take part

- Participate: what is it that they are actually getting involved in

- Continue: how do we ensure they continue to engage with the idea or get others to engage too

At the workshop, each team member had a different hat to wear and a different role to play, and together, they complemented one another perfectly:

- The scribe: writes or draws everything and doesn’t miss a thing

- The listener: listens to all to hear the bigger picture and find opportunities or gaps

- The enthusiast: sees the half-full glass and finds a way for every obstacle

- The critic: finds weak points and suggest improvements

- The doer: transforms conceptual ideas into achievable actions

Imaginers would like to thank Aie Serve for offering their wonderful space for the Develop workshop, and for believing in this initiative. The work they do to empower and support social entrepreneurs is truly inspirational! Check them out here.

Photographs were captured by the talented David Habchy. Check out his work here.