Since starting to make design studios part of my practice some years back, I had to wonder how my practice had been able to function without it up until that point. What I realized was that I–as many traditional designers–had been expending tons and tons of my own energy to try to come up with design solutions and present them to passive team members, when I in fact was surrounded by an incredible source of creative power, in the form of that very same team. IMO, any UX’er today who isn’t incorporating design studio is really losing out.

That said, it is just as important to point out that the design studio described in this post is only _one_ of many variations on this technique. In my practice, I use three variations of design studio.

The first is what I call the “Ideation Clearinghouse” model. In contrast to the above design studio, which is convergent (i.e. the goal is to narrow your exploration to a small number of good ideas), this is a divergent form of design, in which I want to uncover the range of ideas that the project stakeholders have about the product.

This is perfect for doing with business sponsors at the project outset, to capture the product they are seeing in their minds, such that when the team then goes to work to design the real product, they can do so with an awareness of that. Knowing what execs and others who fund the project are imagining the end product to look like is worth nothing less than gold when presenting your own ideas to them. (If not, you may present something that is strong, but because it was not what they expected, you’ll get a thumbs down.)

Then there is the convergent model which you describe and is super-powerful as an activity for the team itself.

Then there is what I call an ad-hoc design studio. This is great for when the team is in the throes of the sprint and some unexpected issue comes up. At that point, a few team members grab some sheets of paper and markers, agree on what the issue is (e.g. something developers thought would be easy to build has turned out to be much harder, so they’ve proposed a different technical solution which in turn will require a very different UI), and do a 5-minute or maybe even 3-minute sketching timebox (sketchbox?), followed by discussion of the ideas proposed. I’ve done sessions like this in under 15 minutes – which brings me to my last point.

From your description of design studios, someone with no experience with them, would get the sense that you need hours and hours to be able complete them. This is simply not true. Yes, for certain models and certain situations, 3-4 hours or more can be time very well spent.

But a design studio can also be much more *lean* than that, i.e. you can also do them in an hour or less, and I think that should be front and center when describing this powerful technique to anyone who is new to it.