At GSD&M, we collaborate with partners to bring great ideas to our clients. We know we don’t have a corner on smarts and that working with other people who are the best in their field allows us to bring great ideas to our clients that make a difference to their business.

That’s why one of our buildings in Idea City is the Dynamic Collaboration Center.

Which brings me to how we desigined Idea City.

In order to get buy-in from all the internal constituents and to develop a prioritized list of requirements for Idea City in Second Life, I ran an “ideation session” where every attendee had an equal opportunity to be heard. I had about a dozen people around a table from various areas in the agency and at all levels, each with a laptop. A prerequisite for participating was that they were familiar with SL in some way, either through a talk I had given, or by going in-world.
I had also invited Giff Constable from The Electric Sheep Company to participate. It was important to me that our development partner have a literal seat at the table so that he could make suggestions and advice us appriopriately.

I had three audiences for Idea Island in mind. I asked the participants to answer a question about the first audience. Everyone began typing and what they typed was broadcast anonymously to the rest of the group. In this way, ideas are evaluated on their merit and not influenced by who said them (like the boss). After a five minutes, we stopped. I then grouped all the comments into buckets and asked the group to prioritize the buckets. By voting, the group prioritized everyone’s thoughts.

I then repeated the process with the other two audiences.

The end result was a prioritized list of requirements produced by an interdisplinary team in 90 minutes. Sure there was prep prior to the meeting, but this was pretty quick to reach consensus on requirements for any project.

I then wrote up a proposal for Giff and the Electric Sheep Company to respond to. I asked to see three designs. Giff put together three different design teams and my executive team ended up picking a design by Rez Menoptra and Endira Udal. That’s what you see today.