Design Workshop #1 Summary
On 8 May we held our first Design Workshop. Here's a short update on where things landed.
Where we're at
The central challenge we worked through was how to make the Lab's outputs both inclusive and robust while balancing predictability with genuinely exploratory design, and how to ensure participants across the four workshops feel meaningfully brought along the journey rather than handed a finished product.
The session focused on designing for the design, not on track content itself. From that frame, a few clear directions emerged.
Key discussions
Track impacts. Decisions made relating to one track may impact others and care needs to be taken to ensure synthesis is undertaken throughout to ensure impacts are well understood.
A generalised skeleton. Each workshop's core intention needs to work across all six tracks, so we're developing a single structural backbone that each track can flex into.
A proposed session flow. Facilitators could move participants through the tracks in a strategic order: Narrative (the why) → Accessibility (the democratic imperative) → Research design (the how) → Community (the who) → Government (the other who) → Technology and experience design (the supporting tools).
The risks we're designing against
We named four real risks: coherence across entangled tracks, speed of synthesis relative to accumulation, the quality of meaningful input from participants, and the small-team weaving it all together.
The structural responses we are exploring:
Cross-track documentation with an overlay table at the top of each track's notes, so connections and dominoes between tracks are visible from the outset.
Ongoing synthesis carried out along the way and shared back to participants quickly, rather than twelve months of accumulation followed by drafting.
A dashboard providing transparent visibility of how tracks interact, accessible to everyone in their own time.
Facilitation-led coherence, with pre-reading and clear framing ("this is the conversation we're having, and here's the prep") so each session is focused without being closed.
Artistic synthesis as a proposed output alongside reports and dashboards, a way of holding the work that words and data alone can't.
Underpinning all of this is a commitment to transparency: clear summaries of discussion, how tracks connect, and how decisions in one space domino into another.
Next steps
Thank you to those who have provided additional feedback to us already. If you were unable to attend but would like to contribute, or have additional follow up thoughts please see Whiteboard here which has the core slide used and sticky notes for you to contribute.