THE METHODOLOGY

Tactile Tools™ Toolkit

The Toolkit
The Tactile Tools™ toolkit comprises customised acrylic tiles and co-created personas. Photographs by Adam R. Thomas, 2018-2019.

Tactile Tools™ Methodology

The Tactile Tools™ toolkit is composed of acrylic tiles that participants use to map various situations. Context is provided via detailed personas and a variety of other maps, keys and supplementary project-specific materials. The methodology compels participants to problem-solve in a haptic way, engaging with goals, roadblocks and work-arounds on the table as meanings rather than as objects. Additional tiles are added to the activity depending on the client and scenario. These may denote stakeholders, empathy, corporate mission or a value that the team wishes to embody. Teams build their way towards a mutually desirable goal, collaboratively problem-solving their way around institutional, structural or social roadblocks that emerge. Physically, they write on tiles and place them on the papered surface, rearranging these until their meanings are coherent. Metaphorically, teams are providing work-arounds to life and death situations, or creating the conditions to support communities through hardship. The flexibility of the tools enables participants to prototype and re-prototype configurations of roadblocks and work-arounds until they determine the best way forward. 

Tactile Tools™ Personas

To encourage groups to empathise with individuals or communities in the workshop setting we create personas in collaboration with our industry partners. These personas detail the lived experience of a person or community that is navigating the societal or structural roadblocks identified in a system. For instance, in One Good Death the personas detailed the experience of a person living under the care and support services of Bolton Clarke. The personas provided information that included the challenges, risks, level of social and familial connection, anticipated life expectancy, key personality attributes and their definition of a ‘good death’. In the Building the future engineer workshop with Aurecon we used community personas on each table to describe the needs, challenges and expectations of the group (business, aged care, health sector, agriculture).