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The Interactive Thread is a design method that helps us gather detailed, contextualised data from a large user population while sharing interaction design methods with professional designers from different disciplines. We developed a set of 10-15 minute exercises drawn from design, social and computer science and presented them as a series woven throughout two interaction design conferences. Our goals were to provide an entertaining, interactive conference activity, to teach and share multi-disciplinary design methods, and to gather information that would otherwise be too labour-intensive for us as designers. This paper reflects on our experiences, including what worked and what did not. We discuss how others may reuse this strategy in other settings, including workshops, conferences and corporate retreats and we include an appendix with the specific interactive thread exercises.
Wendy E. Mackay (Sun,) studied this question.