A Simple Tool to Prime Your Team for Design Work
Introducing the online Stoke Deck
Six years ago, I discovered an unmet need.
I was working at the Stanford d.school and frequently had conversations with colleagues about how we might equip ourselves with tools to make our teaching more effective. I wanted to know how people were thinking about their teaching as well as what was in their instructor’s toolkit.
One thing I kept hearing was: “I love stokes, but I can never remember any when I need one.” Pretty much everyone experienced this pain point at one time or another.
‘Stokes’ are warm-up activities or games meant to prime people for creative collaboration and design work. Stokes can be used at the beginning of a workshop or design sprint to set mindset and behavioral norms, or they can be used to prime specific mindsets or behaviors before specific phases of the process (or even individual design activities). Some can even just be used to energize a group that’s dragging after lunch.
Stokes are magical. They’re fun, they’re educational, and they unlock a team’s creative and collaborative potential. The difference in outcome between running a brainstorm (for example) with vs without a stoke beforehand can be shocking. So when I realized that folks at the d.school were experiencing a barrier to delivering the right stoke at the right time, I had to do something.
I asked my colleague Tania Anaissie (now Founder & CEO of liberatory design firm Beytna Design) if she would lend her design chops and all-around brilliance to designing and delivering a solution. Together, we created the Stoke Deck, a set of cards containing favorite stokes from around the d.school community. Version 1.0 contained almost 30 stokes and was organized into the following categories based on what you needed the stoke to achieve:
- Boost Energy
- Create Focus
- Communicate Mindset
- Get Personal
- Nurture Camaraderie
Tania and I had them made and then introduced them to the community at our end-of-year celebration. People went crazy. They wanted to print more. We saw them in backpacks, purses, pockets, and hands for the rest of the year (and beyond). It was a wonderful moment of identifying a simple problem and developing a simple solution.
And that was that.
Until now.
Inspired by a conversation I had with my friend Jackie del Castillo a few weeks ago, I decided to bring the Stoke Deck online. I kept things simple, partly because done is better than perfect (or pretty, or robust, or mobile-friendly) and partly because I’d never made a website from scratch before.
Check out the online Stoke Deck here — www.stokedeck.io.
Use it. Share it. Break it. Help me fix it. I welcome feedback that will make it more useful, and I invite you to share your favorite stokes so I can add them to the growing library for the world to use.
And stoke on.
I’m Taylor Cone. I’m a collaboration designer, coach, and Founder & CEO of Lightshed. I thrive on helping teams solve problems and innovate better, faster, and more collaboratively. Book time with me here if you’d like to chat.
