Here is an exercise I've been using with teams over the last 8 years, called The Road Junction.

I show teams an overhead image of a road junction. I present some problems with the current layout and then brief teams to work out what they could do to make this junction better.

As an exercise it is deliberately open. The exercise is not just about a team presenting A Final Design. It is more about teams exploring possible designs, what influences there could be on their designs, what they will need to do to understand how those designs work, how those designs could be made, and playing back to others what they have done (which ranges from talking through a process to "this is the best design".) It also gives people a feel for the many layers we have to consider to do better public design. There are a lot of angles to this, which I am not going to list explicitly as it ruins the discovery – I hope there's enough clues in the pack.

There is a small set of slides (on Google Slides) and a PDF image of the road junction, which you can download, copy, whatever you want (except maybe claim it as your work).

I use the slides to frame the situation and brief the people in the room.

The image: I print this out (on A4 usually but some A3s can be really helpful) so there's enough for one for every person in the room, plus some spares.

Materials needed: pens, spare paper, stickies. I've used some toy cars before when I printed the diagram out on A3. (Aside: I enjoy watching people improvise with the materials to explore ideas.)

Teams make up: I try to make sure there is at least one driver and one non driver in each team. I also try to softly keep apart people with the same role, to try to create small multi-discipline-ish teams.

I try to keep the briefing as simple as possible, put the onus on the teams doing stuff together.

Usually I give this an hour: 4 teams, 5 minutes to brief, 35 minutes for the team to explore, 20 minutes for playback (5 minutes each). I've run it as a 90 minute session twice and the extra 30 minutes prompted some interesting researching behaviours from the teams. It's all good.

This pack has been honed over the last 8 years. I've used it quite a few times. It still isn't be perfect, but I felt after the third time I'd done this exercise it was good enough to only make little tweaks to now and again. And I think it's time I just made it available for wider use.

All I ask is if you use it: let me know you used it and how it went.

And yes, this a real road layout. I have changed nothing.