Applying Design Thinking Framework for Planning a Virtual Event
As a product designer, we use a design thinking framework while creating a digital product, from the research phase for the needs of users and business until product implementation with the developer. But now, I would like to share how I implemented a design thinking framework while planning a virtual event until the execution (on pre event phase).
For the whole detail of event detail, there’s an article on our church’s official site here and for the event record here, and also for the whole process of project management (soon).
Discovery (Empathize)
In a company, every product roadmap we did, we must have done that for the purpose of business. But for this project which was named “Joyful Christmas Virtual Festival”, it was a purely non-profit organization project in order to celebrate the Joy of Christmas and togetherness between church communities.
We hope our church community could be involved in every church special event although we’re still in the middle of pandemic — Mattheus, Mangga Besar Parish Council Representative
We saw the problem here that since the pandemic in 2020, we no longer hold any event related to our church, we were not allowed to gather, and we got no chance to celebrate the Joy of Christmas, that was the main reason we hold this event virtual on December 26th, 2021 Live Streaming on Youtube.
The event was initiated from community and to the community. Even from the committee, performers, and viewers were from our church community. On the other hand, the primary objective of Joyful Christmas was also to gather everyone to be involved in church activity and rise again during the pandemic.
Applying Design Thinking Framework
It all started with Planning. For this planning stage, a design thinking method was used from the event concept, delivering ideas, until execution of the ideas to our user, the user in this project is every performer who could also be the viewer, also participate in Joyful Christmas. As the usual design thinking process which may happen in every project management, we executed our idea on the Testing phase but for this project we got to evaluate our execution especially in creative and technical issues such as storyboard changes, video editing, quality control management, etc.
Event Planning (Define)
Due to effectiveness and we were still in the pandemic era, we did several meetings online with every committee, stakeholders, and performers. We started doing the research process which in the design thinking framework we did Define by gathering all requirements from several church organizations (in this church community, we have many organizations which have different lines of work but under the scope of St. Peter & Paulus Church).
We made the list of organizations which could contribute in performing for our virtual event festival based on their skill and ability. After that, we also had casual chats from every coordinator about our event (in general).
Ideate
For the Ideation stage, we gathered as the event committee which was divided into creative and technical teams. Creative team was mostly in charge of the whole event from the planning until implementation and execution. During the pre event we made the concept of our event, themes, designs, storyboards, and performers. As still in pandemic, we would hold our event virtually as a concert that shows any kind of performances from every organization. Technical team was in charge during the preparation of tools needed and execution of the whole project (recording on pre-event and live streaming on main event).
Prototype
All the concepts of the event were made into a presentation and we gathered all the coordinators of every organization to inform them that our church will have a virtual event festival on the following Christmas. We informed our event concept and storyboard performer of each organization so that they would have the direction about what they need to do to prepare for their performance. In this phase, we made the schedule of recording of each performer, concept, script, costume, decoration, and many more.
Prototype is a very crucial phase for this virtual event, with a super tight schedule and many performers we’ve got to manage both internal team and user to be communicated well. We’ve got to deliver every single detail of our concept and planning so that the recording could be done well on the day of execution and still on track for the concept of Joyful Christmas.
Testing
Testing on design thinking framework is executed when the team and users are gathered to try to test the product, then we will hear their perspective while using the new product concept we had made.
During the pre-event, the test phase was executed while we make the recording with every performer we’ve met before through online meetings. They must have practiced a lot in order to give their best performance for the main event. The most thing we often realize during the testing phase is, we would make an evaluation on every testing day we did because by evaluating we could do a better job and decision on the next testing for the next user as well. Testing is also the phase where we will be more understanding about our user and environment they were in, the next angle of shooting, next preparation both internal and external.
Therefore, as we did it with Design Thinking Framework. The way we evaluate what we did in the testing phase, we could return back to prototype, ideate, and even empathize because we will re-learn and review our user, our objective, and of course our value.
Our main goal was to deliver our best concept and valuable video to be presented on December, 26th. We had several recording days and it got even better by the time we entered the editing timeline. For more detail about the project, I will have another post (soon) which will be referred to as Project Management in Virtual Event Festival. Of course it will be related to this project which I had applied Design Thinking Framework for.
