The Collaboration Cup Team Building Exercise
A Hands-on Design Thinking Workshop for Productive Teams Wanting to be Creative
The Collaboration Cup is a guided team-building workshop that blends design thinking with hands-on creativity.
It’s ideal for groups who want to work together on a meaningful project, learn practical innovation tools, and walk away with a tangible, memorable result: a set of hand-painted mugs designed by your own team.
This activity runs about three hours from start to finish and is moderated by an Open Your Art facilitator trained in design thinking and creative collaboration. It’s structured, time-sensitive, and engaging, mixing learning and skill-building.
What Your Team Will Learn
Participants will:
Apply core design thinking concepts — What Is, What If, What Wows, What Works — to a real creative brief.
Experience the full cycle of research, brainstorming, refinement, and execution.
Discover new strengths and deepen connections within the team.
Produce a finished, publicly-presentable design on each mug that will then be fired in our on-site kiln.
Your team’s final design will depend on:
Who the mugs are being designed for — staff, customers, partners, or a target audience.
Each team member’s strengths, imagination, and approach to collaboration.
The creative direction your group chooses through a structured decision process.
The session is facilitated by a guide who will help guide customer research, consult on drafting, and act as a resource for various methods of pottery design. Will the mug need text, a stencilled pattern, a stamp? There are innumerable possibilities for different customers and different teams. In the end, your team will be able to take pride in the fact that they created something unique, meaningful, and - we hope - beautiful.
Collaboration Cup History
One of Open Your Arts ongoing fundraising projects is the Collaboration Cup. The idea behind it is that the whole team can contribute to producing the cup. The design had to be striking, it had to represent Open Your Art’s values in some way, and it had to be relatively easy to produce.
The whole team contributes to collaboration cups. Our potters create the cups, and all our art teachers work on painting the outside during downtime and meetings. It’s a relaxing activity that we all enjoy, but really half the fun is the design. As we have expanded our own team and more individuals have joined who are interested in business and product design, this workshop took shape quickly. We cant’ wait to see your team soon in our studio or at your venue!