Following a short break for the European summer, on 30 September 2022 we held our fourth co-creation workshop and got our first taste of Lego Serious Play®!

This technique helps us to respond to a certain question or concept in a hands-on way by building a 3D representation of our thoughts. It encourages us to look at an idea in a new light and opens the way for new reflections.

Our workshop participants showed off their creative sides as they tested this alternative approach to brainstorm what might hinder PREMSTEM’s goal of taking the stem cell therapy to clinical trial phase.

In the exercise the facilitator asked the participants to create two models, one to describe their concerns related to the co-creation challenge and the other to describe potential barriers ahead.

Cake tins and Russian dolls were used to demonstrate how barriers can arise which we don’t even know exist. One participant used a mirror to talk about the need to reflect on the points of views of all our key stakeholders and used headphones as a symbol of making our science accessible and understandable. Scissors were used to illustrate the importance of maintaining connections, bearing in mind that they can also be broken.

The activity was an interesting way for us to think creatively about the co-creation challenge we’re addressing. We finished the session by noting down the different concerns and obstacles which arose in the activity.

In our next workshop on 3 November we’ll discuss the questions we’d like to ask in the one-to-one interviews and the types of information we’d like to find out from the different stakeholder groups.

If you’d like to join the conversation, sign up on Eventbrite!