Collaborating Remotely

Part 1:  Time with your Team. Even before project planning begins, be sure to build in enough collaboration time to create a sense of community and make idea generation more productive.  

The goals of your project will dictate how much planning time you need to prepare your materials. Once the work is underway, time for testing and piloting prototypes is also important to the overall success. 

If you are developing pre-prepared creativity kits you will need to build in design and production time.  If you are using found materials with your participants you may need to develop more flexible time for “curriculum development” and require less for production. 

Plan on lots of good time for creative consultation and brainstorming with yourself and your collaborators around whatever your prompts are going to be. We used paperback children’s books as we were working with parents and their children.  Caregiver-Elder pairs may want to use scrapbooks or photos or diaries. Prompts can be anything generative from poems to images to kitchen utensils. The sky is the limit here!

Part 2:  Time with and for your participants.  One aspect of time you will not be able to control is how much time (and energy and space) your participants allocate to completing your activities.  

We suggest designing your activities based on your own knowledge of “typical” completion, and adding additional facilitation suggestions that allow for participants to customize their experiences.  

For example, we added recorded artists’ videos that provided modeling for how activities could occur without standardizing how they should occur. 

As you design your interactive activities, you also will need to pay attention to creative risk-taking.  In an in-person synchronous workshop, you can build scaffolded activities that gradually introduce more complex activities that take participant discomfort into account, but for asynchronous activities you have no control over how participants engage your activities or in what order. 

Focusing on the participants’ joint play then and providing multiple opportunities to imaginatively engage becomes a key organizational strategy.  In contexts where participants and their caregivers are playing together but asynchronously from your team, it’s important to provide multiple opportunities for imaginative engagement via the means of theatre – be it role playing, character exploration, visual arts design, music making, movement, or wherever your prompt leads you.

Every communication with participants is an opportunity to engage them in making sense of why creativity matters as well as your project’s mission and values.  

How you communicate, when you communicate, how often you communicate, and the communication end are all under your control.  

• It's best to learn from your participants the best ways to stay in touch with them and to do your best to honor that, even if it means there's no one-size-fits all. How you communicate will be as important as what you communicate.
• We suggest that incorporating traditional digital communication (video, email, SMS, photographs, social media as appropriate) provides low barrier methods.  
• If the communication methodology is too complicated participants will not engage.  We effectively used ClassDojo to maintain privacy but a private Facebook group could also work. 
• Use every opportunity to invite collaboration not only from your teammates but also from your participants, while also modeling creative choice-making and inclusivity.  

And, while you cannot control how your communication is received, playfully and inclusively using your more mundane moments together will keep your team challenged while allowing your participants to better get to know your team, your project and the activities they can participate in.