figmaDec 16, 2024

27 FigJam Activities to Spark Creativity in the Classroom | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

FigJam’s collaborative canvas can make classroom participation more inclusive, creative, and engaging across subjects. The post presents 27 adaptable activities that use sticky notes, drawings, widgets, and shared templates to support community-building, discussion, problem-solving, creative breaks, and assessment. Its central conclusion is that familiar teaching activities become more interactive when students can contribute visually and collaboratively. ## Building Classroom Community - Icebreakers help students share interests, personalities, hobbies, dreams, and favorite subjects. - “Let me introduce myself” activities use sticky notes, stickers, and sketches. - Scavenger hunts prompt students to find classmates with shared experiences or interests. - A virtual “shoe rack” lets students express their individuality creatively. - FigJam tools such as drawing, voice recordings, and photobooths give students multiple ways to participate and connect. ## Making Language and History Come Alive - Shared canvases turn reading and historical analysis into group activities rather than isolated assignments. - Students can visualize character relationships, track plot developments, and discuss themes together. - Templates such as book chats support collaborative literary discussion. - History activities can encourage students to debate perspectives and investigate events collectively. ## Visualizing STEM Concepts - FigJam activities help students represent abstract scientific, mathematical, and technical ideas visually. - Collaborative diagrams, notes, and sketches can support group problem-solving. - The flexible canvas allows teachers to adapt activities for different subjects and grade levels. ## Taking Creative Brain Breaks - Short, playful FigJam exercises can reenergize students between lessons. - Drawing, visual prompts, and collaborative challenges provide a creative change of pace. - These breaks maintain engagement while still encouraging communication and imagination. ## Checking Understanding Together - Teachers can use shared templates to see how students are processing a lesson. - Students can contribute answers, questions, reflections, and visual explanations in one collaborative space. - Group responses make misconceptions easier to identify and create opportunities for peer discussion. Overall, the post recommends using FigJam as a flexible classroom workspace rather than limiting it to presentations. Its free education access and adaptable templates make it suitable for teachers who want more inclusive, participatory learning activities.

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figmaDec 6, 2023

Come together: A multiplayer guide to great meetings | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Great meetings are intentionally designed collaborative experiences, not merely calendar events or “glorified emails.” The article argues that successful meetings depend on four pillars: purpose, preparation, participation, and follow-up. Both facilitators and participants share responsibility for creating focused sessions that use everyone’s time and strengths effectively. ## Meetings as Designed Experiences - Meetings often fail because they lack a clear purpose, adequate preparation, active participation, or follow-up. - Effective facilitators design an experience that helps the team collaborate and accomplish concrete goals. - Participants also play an important role in making meetings purposeful and engaging. ## Before the Meeting: Plan for Success Preparation creates the conditions for inclusive and productive collaboration. ### Define the Meeting’s Goal - Clarify whether the meeting is intended to: - Track progress - Make a decision - Share information or insights - Build context across a team - Choose the meeting format based on its purpose. - Shishir Mehrotra’s framework groups meetings into: - **Cadence:** recurring staff meetings, standups, and project syncs - **Catalyst:** decision forums, product reviews, and design critiques - **Context:** all-hands meetings, off-sites, orientations, and one-on-ones - The right category helps determine the questions, participants, and structure required. ### Prepare and Share an Agenda - Circulate an agenda before the meeting, ideally a day in advance. - Include pre-read materials such as: - Project briefs - Documentation - Sketches - Other background information - Use an existing template rather than starting from a blank page. - FigJam templates can structure the discussion, collect participants’ ideas and questions ahead of time, and organize meetings around prompts or “provocations.” - Successful formats can be saved as reusable shared templates, while AI can help generate customized meeting structures. A practical meeting recommendation is to define the intended outcome first, then choose the appropriate format and share enough context for participants to contribute before the meeting begins.

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figmaNov 6, 2023

Introducing AI to FigJam | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

FigJam’s new AI features are designed to solve practical collaboration problems rather than serve as a novelty. Users can generate meeting templates and diagrams from plain-language prompts, summarize brainstorms, and automatically organize sticky notes. Figma argues that this lowers the barrier to visual collaboration while helping experienced users move more quickly from ideas to action. ## AI-Powered FigJam Features - Generate templates for weekly syncs, brainstorms, reviews, and other meetings. - Create visual timelines and organizational charts from a simple prompt. - Summarize the contents of a brainstorm or meeting. - Sort and group sticky notes by theme automatically. - Customize generated outputs based on common workflows and best practices. ## Lowering the Barrier to Visual Collaboration - FigJam AI lets users describe their goals in everyday language instead of learning specialized design software. - A prompt such as “I need a meeting with four people” can produce an initial meeting template. - This approach makes visual collaboration more accessible to people without design backgrounds. - It supports Figma’s goal of “lowering the floor and raising the ceiling”: making the product easier to use while expanding what users can accomplish. ## Solving the Blank Canvas Problem - Starting with an empty FigJam file can make users unsure how to begin. - AI acts as an initial brainstorming partner, helping users move toward actionable next steps. - Tasks such as summarizing complex discussions or synthesizing ideas into categories can take significant manual effort. - Automating this work allows teams to focus on discussion, decision-making, and higher-level collaboration. ## Building AI Around Real User Problems - Figma says its product team drew on its own experience using FigJam to identify useful applications. - The features focus on everyday collaboration needs rather than adding AI for its own sake. - Templates and prompts are based on established practices and common use cases. - The article presents generative AI as a way to make visual tools more useful and approachable across disciplines. FigJam AI is positioned as a practical assistant for getting started, organizing information, and reducing repetitive work. Its main value is helping more people participate in visual collaboration without requiring them to master design tools first.

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figmaAug 22, 2023

Give ideas more space with Jambot | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Jambot is a FigJam widget that brings ChatGPT’s generative capabilities into a collaborative, visual canvas. Figma created it to move beyond the limitations of linear chat, allowing people to ideate, branch into related topics, summarize discussions, and explore ideas together. The project reflects Figma’s broader view that AI interfaces should become more spatial, tangible, and multiplayer. ## From Chatbots to Creative Collaboration - Large language models can simulate spontaneous brainstorming and provide a broad base of knowledge. - ChatGPT’s conversational format is useful but can feel one-sided and restrictive during creative work. - Jambot was designed to make AI interaction more collaborative and adaptable to group ideation. ## Limitations of Linear Chat - Chat conversations present ideas in a one-dimensional sequence. - When ChatGPT offers multiple possibilities, exploring one path makes it difficult to return to another without scrolling and repeating questions. - Linear chat makes it unnatural to branch into related topics, compare alternatives, or see how ideas connect. ## A Visual Alternative - Jambot began as an internal Figma AI hackathon project described as “a visual version of ChatGPT.” - Its concept draws on networked-thinking tools such as Roam Research and Logseq, which link and organize ideas across pages. - The team was also inspired by Albus, which gives AI interaction a more visual structure. - LangChain influenced the idea of making sophisticated AI workflows visually tangible rather than requiring users to write code. ## Rethinking AI Interfaces - The team argues that users are currently “stuck in chat boxes,” much as they became dependent on video-call interfaces like Zoom. - Existing AI interfaces can feel primitive and command-line-like, despite decades of progress in graphical user interfaces. - Designers have an opportunity to develop new interaction patterns that provide more context, identity, and flexibility than simple conversational prompts. - A visual canvas can make AI more approachable while supporting branching ideas and shared participation. ## What Jambot Enables - Ideation and brainstorming directly inside FigJam. - Summarizing conversations or collections of ideas. - Riffing on concepts and extending them in multiple directions. - Collaborative exploration of AI-generated output within a multiplayer workspace. Jambot’s central recommendation is to treat AI as something that can inhabit richer environments than a chat window. By placing generative AI on a shared visual canvas, Figma aims to give teams more space to explore, connect, and develop ideas together.

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