IoT ideas workshop

• 8-20 people
• 1 day
• Decision makers & practitioners
• Cards instead of electronics

The group picks a scenario and a persona. Both impose limits, and that is what helps: ideas become concrete because they are meant for someone in particular. Everyday objects are then added and extended with sensors, services and responses. A connected bin with a tilt sensor that reports when it falls over is the textbook example.

Cards then come into play that call the group’s thinking back into question. The group examines its own idea from an outside perspective and reworks it. Each concept is sketched on a storyboard and presented at the end in two minutes.

Several worked-out project ideas you can carry forward. If applications are to come out of them, the next step is a prototype: the paper concept becomes something built, with sensors and hardware. That is a phase of its own and not part of this day.

The second outcome stands independently of that: the group has worked out together how connected devices function, where their limits lie and what questions they raise.

I bring an adapted deck of cards, in German-speaking contexts in German. I adapt the cards to the group; the standard cards work just as well.

The method is not mine. It was developed as the Tiles IoT Toolkit at NTNU Trondheim and is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cards and board are freely available, and you can work with them without me.

The cards and the board are published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You can download them, print them and work with them without me. The card backs are for double-sided printing.

German

• Cards (PDF, 12 MB)
• Card backs (PDF, 420 kB)
• Board (PDF, 2.7 MB)

English

• Cards (PDF, 7.2 MB)
• Board (PDF, 2.6 MB)
• Booklet (PDF, 360 kB)

Projects where the expertise and the picture are already in place. Where it is clear what is to be built, generating ideas achieves little.

A different use remains in that case: anyone facing a procurement decision understands afterwards what is being decided. But that is building competence, not finding ideas. It should be said in advance.