Drawing Toast Exercise

Drawing Toast is an exercise to help groups think together in the process of problem solving. We began by drawing step by step infographics in in pairs. Quickly, we realized that we had to decide which steps were of higher priority. The model we created ended up with five steps and consisted of a rough outline without going into much detail. The illustrations were equally rough, but it was clear how to go from step 1 to 5 with a piece of bread and end with toast.

Next, we were asked to create an infographic for how to do our laundry. This time we drew our steps again on post-it notes and ordered them ourselves. The process included several more steps and some details we had left out before. Despite having more steps, we were able to agree on which steps were important quicker than with toast.

Lastly, we took the same post-it notes with illustrations and organized them in a larger group without speaking. Initially this proved difficult as communication became a challenge, however, as we were forced to pick items when time began to run out, the group became effective. In chronological order, we picked different notes from the various groups with no disagreement until the final included was a mix from everyone.