Sprint

This is an excellent book, and so much better than the ‘Design Sprint' book I reviewed recently, which suffered from being full of pictures, but none of them relating to the content of the book...
This volume, conversely, is sparsely illustrated but each one is directly relevant.

I teach design, and I use methods like this in curriculum development. I'm actually doing my PhD on the use of methods like this as a way of promoting creative approaches to teaching and learning in Higher Education. So it's quite timely. All the methods are familiar to me from design research, service design etc. What makes a sprint interesting is that it makes clear what a lot of us have known for a long time: you don't need months and endless committees to make decisions. In fact that's a great way not to make decisions. What you need is a short burst of focused time, and a plan.

Although the book says otherwise, you can use these techniques in much shorter timeframes, depending on what you need. I used a two-hour sprint to get from nothing to a coherent School strategy that everyone has signed up to - I spent three years trying to do the same thing at my last university!

The Design Sprint book is focused on interaction design. This book looks mainly at services and products. That's better. But... I'm using it to design a course and as the week progresses the process requires more and more customisation until the Friday just doesn't work for our purposes. The principle does and this is the book's weakest point that just at the point where the readership is likely to diverge, the content becomes the most prescriptive and most likely to lose people. Next iteration, I'd suggest the authors look at this section so it covers a larger range of problems being tackled. But that's really a minor criticism - if you're reading this book you're hopefully quite a creative type anyway, able to adapt to suit.

Another point might be that the examples cited in the book tend to be ones where participants were ‘on board' with the whole idea. In my experience there is usually at least one recalcitrant. Some tips on dealing with negativity would be useful.

My other recommendation would be that the supporting website collect readers' case studies - it would be a fascinating resource and help people find examples similar to their own needs. I can't be the only person using sprints to design degree programmes, can I?

But all that aside, this is a really good book, easy and quick to read and one that will make you keen to give it a go. Start with something simple, if you can. But given the situation in my own country at the moment, I wish some of our politicians would read it and realise that maybe they don't need six years to figure out what the UK will look like post-Brexit. Maybe they just need a week.