The most important design in a design workshop is often invisible.
Design toolkits are not mere facilitation materials but carefully designed experiences that fundamentally shape how participants think, collaborate, and create together. Toolkits serve three critical roles: enabling cross-disciplinary participation through shared language, documenting the evolution of ideas throughout research, and crystallizing complex concepts into tangible understanding.
- Sheng-Hung Lee facilitated a two-day Design for Longevity workshop with 40 students from Taiwan and Japan using 18 design cards
- At MIT AgeLab, Lee designed Longevity Planning Blocks—12 weighted acrylic cubes—and conducted research with 90+ participants
- Design toolkits serve three roles: boundary objects enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration, research infrastructure documenting thinking, and synthesis artifacts crystallizing complex ideas
Researcher Sheng-Hung Lee examines how design toolkits function as invisible yet essential mediators in participatory workshops, serving as boundary objects, research infrastructure, and synthesis artifacts that shape collaboration and knowledge creation.
Most of us walk into a design workshop and notice the obvious things: the people in the room, the problem being solved, the ideas that emerge on whiteboards and sticky notes. What we rarely see is the invisible architecture that made those ideas possible in the first place. Researcher Sheng-Hung Lee has spent years studying what actually shapes collaboration in these spaces, and her conclusion is quietly radical: the most important design in a design workshop is not the final concept or prototype. It is the toolkit itself.
Lee came to this realization after months of co-facilitating participatory workshops and interviews. She had been trained in both industrial design and electrical engineering, and had worked at firms like IDEO and Continuum on projects ranging from the Ford 360 user experience initiative to retail experiences for GAP. Across all these contexts, she noticed something consistent: the artifacts people used to think together—the cards, blocks, prompts, and materials—were never just facilitation props. They were active mediators of how conversations unfolded, how ideas took shape, and whether collaboration actually happened.
Consider a concrete example from her work. In June, Lee facilitated a two-day Design for Longevity workshop bringing together forty students from Shih Chien University in Taiwan and Musashino Art University in Japan. They worked in eight interdisciplinary teams using the D4L Toolkit, a set of eighteen design cards that functioned as a shared research artifact. These cards guided students through campus observations and reflections on how universities could become more longevity-friendly. The toolkit was not a worksheet to fill out. It was a language that allowed students from different cultures and disciplines to think together.
In her doctoral research at MIT, working with the MIT AgeLab, Lee designed something different: the Longevity Planning Blocks, twelve weighted acrylic cubes meant to be touched, rotated, and arranged. Rather than another set of cards, the goal was to create an environment where participants could collaboratively explore the complex challenges of retirement planning and later life. She conducted qualitative research with more than ninety participants, watching how tangible artifacts could support conversations that abstract interview questions could not.
From this work, Lee identified three essential roles that design toolkits play. First, they function as boundary objects—creating shared spaces where people from different backgrounds, with different vocabularies and perspectives, can collaborate despite their differences. The Longevity Planning Blocks, for instance, transformed abstract discussions about financial planning into personal conversations through the act of making and arranging. They created what Lee calls an exploratory space where participants could experiment without fear of giving the "right" answer. Unlike traditional surveys, a well-designed toolkit encourages iteration and even failure as learning opportunities.
Second, toolkits serve as research infrastructure. They naturally document the evolution of ideas. As a project evolves, the toolkit evolves with it, becoming embedded in the research process itself rather than merely supporting it. This aligns with Research through Design, an approach that positions the act of designing as a legitimate mode of inquiry. The toolkit's purpose is rarely fixed. It adapts to new insights, changing research questions, and practical constraints. Even something as ordinary as Post-it Notes, Sharpies, and Play-Doh represents an intentional design choice. Before placing these materials on a table, designers should ask: Should this toolkit serve as an icebreaker? Should it support collaborative mapping? Should it enable serious play? These seemingly small decisions fundamentally shape both the research experience and its outcomes.
Third, toolkits function as synthesis artifacts. They force researchers to clarify their own thinking by distilling large amounts of qualitative insight into prompts, visuals, and interactions that support collective sense-making. Every word, graphic, and interaction must justify its existence within constraints of space, budget, time, and attention. The D4L Cards became more than communication devices; they evolved into tangible syntheses of the research itself, filled with researchers' comments, sketches, and annotations that documented iterative refinement throughout the design process.
Lee draws on designer Jasper Morrison's concept of "Objectality"—the character and spirit that an object embodies, arising from the balance of many variables including form and void, materials and absence, discretion and indiscretion. A toolkit possesses its own objectality, and this character influences how facilitators guide discussions, how participants engage with one another, and ultimately how the entire workshop unfolds. Designing a toolkit is not simply about producing a collection of artifacts. It is about shaping the character of collaboration itself. By designing better toolkits, we create better conversations, stronger collaboration, and ultimately more meaningful design outcomes.
Citações Notáveis
A toolkit possesses its own character, and this character influences how facilitators guide discussions, how participants engage with one another, and ultimately how the entire workshop unfolds.— Sheng-Hung Lee
Designing a toolkit requires researchers to synthesize large amounts of qualitative insight into prompts, visuals, and interactions that support collective sense-making.— Sheng-Hung Lee
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does a toolkit matter more than the ideas people generate in the workshop itself?
Because the toolkit shapes what ideas are even possible to generate. It's the difference between asking someone to describe their experience versus giving them objects to arrange and manipulate. One constrains thinking to language. The other opens it up to discovery.
But couldn't you just ask better questions instead of designing physical objects?
You could. But questions assume people know how to articulate what they think. A toolkit lets people think through making, through touch, through arrangement. It's a different mode of knowing altogether.
So you're saying the Post-it Notes in a design thinking workshop are actually doing more work than we realize?
Exactly. We treat them as neutral materials, but they're not. Their color, their size, their tactility—all of that shapes how people engage. Someone chose those constraints deliberately, even if we don't see it.
What happens if you design a toolkit poorly?
You get a workshop where people feel like they're filling out a form rather than thinking together. The toolkit becomes a barrier instead of a bridge. Participants sense when you haven't respected their time and intelligence through your design choices.
Is there a risk of over-designing? Of making the toolkit so clever it gets in the way?
Yes. The best toolkits are often invisible. They feel natural, almost inevitable. The work is in making something that feels simple but was actually quite difficult to design.