A Games-Based Toolkit to Facilitate Creative Thinking
Designercise was created to address the issues of creative problem solving, to increase ideation practices in everyday environments, and to introduce a range of critical issues for consideration to corporate design making.
Early in her career, Leyla became frustrated by how often she heard people claim they weren’t creative—and by the fact that many of the world’s complex social and environmental problems persist because people are not willing to think creatively about them. Deeply engaged in researching cognitive science, bias and the cognitive habits that limit she developed Designercise to challenge people to think about problems and biases in different ways.
With more than 20 boredom-busting brain exercises, the Designercise active ideation toolkit helps develop critical and flexible thinking skills, encourages rapid ideation and offers a fun mental workout to help brighten up your grey matter and inspire creativity.
Successfully funded by a Kickstarter in August 2015, a limited edition run of the full toolkit in a delightful suitcase and smaller thematic kits were produced and sent to the funders. Designercise is now available as downloadable DIY kits to the wider community.
How it was done
Designercise was developed over 18 months while Leyla was the Disruptor in Residence at the Center for Social Innovation in New York. She hosted lunchtime sessions at co-working spaces around New York that explored specific cognitive biases. For example, she helped participants bust their functional fixedness bias (the tendency to see objects only in terms of their intended use) through hands-on exercises and games that challenged them to reimagine the use cases for everyday items, such as spatulas.
These fun interactive sessions served as a testing ground for a wide range of interventions to get people to think differently, resulting in a collection of games and exercises that were refined and tested to be effective in workshops, classrooms and team settings to unlock new ideas and approaches.
Leyla successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the challenge of producing several hundred physical kits sustainably and ethically. Since then, Designercise has expanded to include digital versions and compact “micro kits” to fit a range of needs and formats and Leyla has been delighted to bump into it in different locations around the world!
“Years of teaching and consulting in creative thinking and innovation led me to ask, how do we get people to quickly bust through their cognitive biases and brain ruts to start developing new creative ideas? Designercise was initially a tool to help us activate others when facilitating, but quickly turned into a full blown ideation toolkit with the power to bust through even the most rigid thinker.”
– Leyla Acaroglu
The Designercise Family
A must-have for any facilitator’s toolkit, each mini kit includes a range of games and is perfect for both educational and professional settings
Four smaller kits were designed to round out the Full Deluxe Kit. Each one is themed around a specific area of creative skill-building: storytelling, design thinking, improvisation, and flexible thinking. Together, they support ideation in action, helping facilitators create high-energy environments that foster collaboration and creative problem-solving.
The Designercise Kids Kit is also included in this collection. Designed to help younger people think differently through a series of fun, age-appropriate ideation games, it offers the perfect entry point to explore empathy, design research, innovative thinking and the role of design in everyday life.
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