After a jolly dinner the previous evening, a few people jokingly complained about our 9am meeting time on our last day! But, everything was planned! We organised very chill and flexible morning activities. Participants had to choose between four tracks to have tangible discussions on how can we help each other as a group of same-minded people.
As we were all a bit groggy, a participant suggested playing a ‘warmer exercise’ which was a great idea to freshen up our minds and muscles. Because it was a sunny morning, we decided to go outside and play.
<aside> <img src="/icons/meeting_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/meeting_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> Collaborative Rock, Paper, Scissors Each person finds a partner to play ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’, the person who wins carries on to find another partner with the losers tailing behind them cheering them on.
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The grand final of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" taking place in front of CERN IdeaSquare
It was great to have a participant introduce us to this game as it meant that the participants were taking onboard the idea of collaboration and that this event wasn’t just about what the facilitators were bringing to the drawing board.
For these four tracks our intention was for the participants to have more proactive roles in either supporting the future of Humanitarian Designers or supporting each other in their diverse journeys.
We also wanted to give the participants the freedom to explore their own ideas and come up with the last discussion topic.
Slide of the four suggested tracks
Having one open track created unexpected challenges: while participants were enthusiastic about the emerging topics, facilitators struggled to make quick decisions to accommodate everyone. We ultimately replaced the planned Track 01 — Humanitarian Designers Community with one of the most popular suggested topics.