Recreating the buzz of an in-person workshop, using Figma & FigJam

How do you inject your company’s DNA into a workshop when you can’t meet in person?

That was the challenge MHP – A Porsche Company - faced when the pandemic meant they could no longer host clients in their Berlin office.

MHP provide consulting services to the automotive industry, and run workshops to help clients like Porsche, Volkswagen and many others with design strategy, design systems and service design. In 2020, when in-person workshops were no longer possible, Niclas Bauermeister and Marcel Tobien, both Interaction Designers & Managers at MHP, started thinking of ways to approach things differently.

Outside of work, they began exploring ways to create more engaging digital experiences using virtual spaces with interactive objects ranging from furniture and plants to customizable pizza and burger ingredients. Their personal project evolved into LabKit (available in the Figma Community) - a collaborative way to create digital experiences using Figma and FigJam.

Their hobby soon evolved into something they thought they could use in a professional setting.

Niclas and Marcel looked at old pictures from workshops in MHP’s office, and started recreating physical objects as Figma components. “We used Figma and FigJam to create an experience that people would recognise - a virtual workshop that included many of the visual assets they remembered from our office.”

By using variants in Figma, they could quickly create new versions of objects - different coloured cabinets, room dividers, lamps and more. Before long, the virtual workshop was taking shape.

But while the designs were developed in Figma, Niclas and Marcel opted for FigJam as the platform to actually run the workshops. They copied the Figma files into FigJam, and used FigJam’s collaboration features to add a layer of interactivity to sessions. Workshop participants were soon interacting with objects, posting sticky notes, and giving each other ‘high fives’.

“When the first feedback came in, people said, ‘oh yeah, we feel really alive again - I want to go back into this workshop setting’,” says Niclas.

The initiative reflects MHP's design strategy for client projects - to create human-centered and delightful employee experiences based on interactive learning.

“With Figma and FigJam we can design experiences. We’re not just building static workshops that are based on templates,” says Niclas. “We’re designing how we want people to feel, how they want to interact in the workshop setting and to be together to ideate, to create, to design prototypes.”

And by running events in the virtual world, Niclas and Marcel are no longer designing experiences for participants in Berlin only. MHP has international offices in the USA, UK, China and Romania, and the new way of working brings clients and teams together from all over the world. “It was great to see people in Berlin directly working with people in Atlanta,” says Marcel. “Using FigJam as a platform means we can run workshops that are truly global.”