Hi folks!
I thought I’d share a tool to design community and staff engagement activities. It’s called the “6-dimensional enchanting event constructor”.
Here’s the idea: I’ve gradually become convinced that the #1 rule for successful community engagement is to be, well, engaging! In other words, to design initiatives that are buzzworthy, fun, game-like, social and tasty (as well as important) – the kind of things we would want to “come and play” with even if we weren’t being paid.
When I see teams designing engagement projects under pressure, the first thing that tends to suffer is their ability to remember ideas they already know are engaging and fun. This seems like a small matter, but it effectively destroys their capacity for creativity, because creativity is all about mixing and matching existing ideas. As a result the solution is often just “another workshop”.
So this tool aims to be a memory-jogger. You can use it as a team activity, with pairs of people assembling alternatives then presenting them to the group.
(Use the attached PDF which has instructions, not just the image above.)
Hope you find it useful.
Best wishes
– Les
P.S. This is version 1 – let me know if you can see any ways to improve it. Remember that it’s not meant to contain EVERY possible idea, just enough to wake up our imaginations.
Tool: The 6-dimensional enchanting event constructor
Thank you dear Les. Your website and blog are a wellspring of experience. I really enjoy that colourful cube, and was wondering if it were not a puzzle cube instead, where you can shift all the sides as you please, but where really there is no fixed “default” state… It always seems hard to make cubes and scales work fully in 3D, in order to either assess or design successful community engagement. I always find that there are strong cave-ats if one takes a scale or cube too literally, which sometimes undermines the value of these assessment/design tools as heuristic devices. E.g. Archun Fung’s democracy cube, or MacEachren and Kraak’s geospatial visualisation cube are cases in point. Will follow your work more actively. Or maybe the 6 Dimensional event constructor should be left for end-users to customise as they sit most fit, best on your template. Best / Ian
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes I agree. “All models are wrong but some are useful (sometimes).” This cube is meant to be a fun memory-expanded, rather than a serious conceptual model. I thought I’d try to make it game-like so people would enjoy doing it. I haven’t used it in a workshop yet, but I predict it’ll lead to a lot of laughter…which is a sign that creativity is happening. – Warm regards – Les