Designers use social media and other general-purpose tools to collaborate across organizations due to their accessibility and ease of use and learning. However, such tools are cumbersome in covering the specific collaboration needs of design activities. Alice elicits ad hoc collaboration in design teams by facilitating team members to use their own set of tools in a seamless way.

Participants highlighted that Alice serves as a central reference for the coordination of teamwork by providing an overview of rhythms and temporal relationships of design activities. Our work suggests that collaboration tools could be portrayed as technologies of time production. This reveals opportunities for future research on how the temporal agency embodied by the collaboration tools affects collaborative activities in design.

Creative workshops are a key element of design and innovation processes. User research on workshop facilitation resulted in the notion that facilitators face the most problems related to engaging their workshop participants. Furthermore, it informed us that problems with engagement can be caused by many different reasons. Therefore, three different tools were designed to be used in different situations before, during and after a workshop, whenever the facilitator feels it can be helpful. Together the tools form an engagement toolkit for workshop facilitators of any kind of (design) workshop.

The tools in the toolkit are designed using the lean design thinking approach, in which short iterations of 'building', 'measuring' and 'learning' are applied after a substantial period of user research. A summative evaluation of the complete toolkit at the end of the design process has shown that the tools are evaluated positively, by qualitative as well as quantitative measures, although facilitators and participants have personal preferences for specific tools.