Co-creation brainstorm toolkit

Waag has developed a co-creation brainstorm toolkit for cultural heritage professionals to assist them in defining their co-creation process. It has its place very early on in a co-creation project. Practically the toolkit guides you and your team through a structured brainstorm process. The brainstorm is set up in such a way that it will help you to critically look at your own ability as an organization to engage in co-creation, explore the skills you need, identify potential stakeholders for your co-creation trajectory and clearly define the impact you want to have.

The co-creation brainstorm toolkit consists of: game master instructions, that will guide you through the session; a printable mat, which consists of three (colored) circles of attention, helping you to physically ‘lay out’ your conversation on the table; collaborative exercise cards, containing instructions for the brainstorm; canvasses, helping to visualize or storyboard your ideas; method cards, illustrating our favorite co-creation methods to choose from.

The flow of the kit makes sure that active, collaborative elements of a co-creation session are already part of this early discussion, so the team gains experience in working co-creatively themselves. The toolkit is developed following the analysis of a number of co-creation case studies in the heritage domain, in combination with the existing expertise of the authors/creators, Waag’s Future Heritage Lab and Janine Huizenga. She was also responsible for the design.

Get started

Below you will find all the documents you need to assemble the brainstorm toolkit. You can download them (pdf format) and print them yourself or print them at a print shop. The toolkit consists of:

1. The Game Master instructions, which will guide you through the session.
2. The printable Game Mat (19 MB) which helps you to physically ‘lay out’ your discussion on the table. The coloured circles relate to the WHO, the HOW and the IMPACT of your process.
3. Exercise cards, containing instructions for collaborative exercises.
4. Support material per circle:
   - WHO: the Stakeholder cut-out sheet and the Stakeholder canvas;
   - HOW: a set of Method cards and the Action canvas;
   - IMPACT: the Organisation cut out sheet, the Transformation cut out sheet and the Storyboard canvas.

All pdf files can be printed on a regular printer (A4 format), except the Mat. For printing the Mat you have two options:

1. Print in one go: send the file to your local printer that can plot the Mat on A0 format (one square meter), or adjust the printing size to fit the format of your table.
2. Print the separate elements of the Mat, using this PDF (A3 format).