Stimulating people's imagination to use new tools

Two familar scenarios + ongoing design questions + an idea:

Scenario one:
I'm invited to work with people on a project for starting a distributed community of practice using new technologies. The people in the team don't use RSS feeds or tags but understand the potential and want to introduce it for others. So in our team we communicate about the project via e-mail, telephone and face-to-face meetings.

Scenario two:
I'm doing a workshop about new technologies where the starting point may be a discussion group or forum. I introduce people to new technologies and start bringing their del.icio.us or flickr feeds into a shared space like a Wiki, or more recently, into Drupal.

Ongoing design questions (see Nancy's second wave adoption):

• Are we focusing on the right value to the people we are asking to use these new tools and ways of working?
• How do we stimulate people's imagination to try new things, like tools and processes that may be of use?
  
• How do we trigger inventiveness with new tools?

And another related design question I puzzle over:

• understanding Web2.0 is more than the sum of knowing how to use individual tools. How can you zoom in and out of individual tools and the bigger picture without making it feel overwhelming?
  

An idea:

The other day I was wondering if it wasn't worth my while spending some time at the beginning of a project to set up a Google homepage or a Netvibes page where the team I'm working with (in the first scenario) could get a feel for how RSS feeds (and maybe tags) could serve them. Even if I was the only one with a calendar, flickr and del.icio.us feed in their desktop homepage, they would also get a feel for what it was like if we to be some context as well as exchanging ideas, plans and information.

Then I saw that Weblogg-ed is using Pageflakes as a student portal.  Pageflakes is similar to Netvibes. A brilliant related idea! I'm going to set up a working group portal on Pageflakes or Netvibes for the project I'm working on. Team members will also be able to edit it. The rest of the team can have it as their homepage (or not) and sooner or later might start developing it and making it their own.

I'm also going to set one up for the beginning of a workshop. Hey! I'm also thinking you could design a Pageflake page for the run up to an event or a conference...  I think this has great potential for stimulating people imagination and it's a concrete way to help people get a picture of the overall benefit of the tools without them having to know how to use each individual one.

technorati tags:desktop, designforlearning