Ideation

simmertalwar65
Feb 5, 2016
5 min read

After research, follows ideation, where I tried to convert all my ideas and thoughts into tangible outcomes. I deduced the direction I wished to take and progressed from there.

Ideate is the mode during your design process in which you focus on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes- it is a mode of “flaring” rather than “focus.” The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space; both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas.

"If you freeze an idea too quickly, you fall in love with it. If you refine it too quickly, you become attached to it and it becomes very hard to keep exploring, to keep looking for better. The crudeness of the early models in particular is very deliberate.” - Jim Glymph, Gehry Partners

Method: Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a great way to come up with a lot of ideas that you would not be able to generate by just sitting down with a pen and paper. The intention of brainstorming is to leverage the collective thinking of the group, by engaging with each other, listening, and building on other ideas. Conducting a brainstorm also creates a distinct segment of time when you intentionally turn up the generative part of your brain and turn down the evaluative part. Brainstorming can be used throughout a design process; of course to come up with design solutions, but also any time you are trying to come up with ideas, such as planning where to do empathy work, or thinking about product and services related to your project – as two examples.

Be intentional about setting aside a period of time when your team will be in “brainstorm mode” – when the sole goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible, and when judgment of those ideas will not come into the discussion. Invest energy into a short period of time, such as 15 or 30 minutes of high engagement. Get in front of a whiteboard or around a table, but take an active posture of standing or sitting upright. Get close together.

Write down clearly what you are brainstorming. Using a How-Might-We (HMW) question is a great way to frame a brainstorm (e.g. HMW give each shopper a personal checkout experience?). (See more on the How Might We questions method.)

There are at least two ways to capture the ideas of a brainstorming:

Scribe: the scribe legibly and visually captures on the board ideas that team members call out. It is very important to capture every idea, regardless of your own feelings about each idea.
All-in: Each person will write down each of his or her ideas as they come, and verbally share it with the group. It is great to do this with post-it notes, so you can write your idea and then stick it on the board. Follow and (nicely) enforce the brainstorming rules – they are intended to increase your creative output.

Good facilitation is key to a generative brainstorm. You brainstorm to come up with many, wide-ranging ideas; a good facilitator sets the stage for the team to be successful doing this.

Method: Bodystorming

Bodystorming is a unique method that spans empathy work, ideation, and prototyping. Bodystorming is a technique of physically experiencing a situation to derive new ideas. It requires setting up an experience - complete with necessary artifacts and people - and physically “testing” it. Bodystorming can also include physically changing your space during ideation. What you're focused on here is the way you interact with your environment and the choices you make while in it.

We bodystorm to generate unexpected ideas that might not be realized by talking or sketching. We bodystorm to help create empathy in the context of possible solutions for prototyping. If you're stuck in your ideation phase, you can bodystorm in the context of a half-baked concept to get you thinking about alternative ideas. Designing a coffee bar? Set up a few foam cubes and "order" a coffee! Bodystorming is also extremely useful in the context of prototyping concepts. Have a couple concepts you're testing? Bodystorm with both of them to help you evaluate them. Developing any sort of physical environment demands at least a few bodystorms.

This a straight-forward method, but one that is only useful if you fully engage with it. Get physical! If you are trying to ideate in the context of hospital patients, try walking through the experience to come up with new ideas. If you are designing products for the elderly, rub some Vaseline on your glasses to view the world through older eyes. Bodystorm by moving around and becoming aware of the physical spaces and experiences related to your solutions. Pay close attention to decision-making directly related to your environment and related emotional reactions. Dig into the "WHY"!

Word Connections

Word connections are an idea generation method that will help you develop ideas that are out of the ordinary. Pick a word to describe the problem you are currently trying to solve. That word will be your object. For example, if the problem is that a village lacks clean water, your object word might be water. Next, use either yourself or a dictionary to come up with a list of random nouns not directly related to your object--these will be your response words. It is important that there is not already a connection between the object and response word. If water is your object word, fish would be an example of a bad response word. An example of good response words for water would be: bike, documentation, and fashion. After you have your object and response words it is time to start generating ideas. Try to connect your object word to your response word in terms of the problem. Write your explanation, or narration, of your thought process for the connections. Through this exercise you may come up with new ideas for your business or new features of that business just by thinking about these words that you thought had nothing to do with your idea! You may use these ideas or you may not but this definitely will get you thinking creatively about your business.

Your brainstorm should generate many, wide-ranging ideas. Now harvest that brainstorm, so those ideas don’t just sit there on the board. Harvesting is straight forward for some brainstorms (pick a couple of ideas), but when ideating design solutions give some thought to how you select ideas. Carry forward a range of those ideas, so you preserve the breadth of solutions and don’t settle only for the safe choice.

In the selection process, don’t narrow too fast. Don’t immediately worry about feasibility. Hang on to the ideas about which the group is excited, amused, or intrigued. An idea that is not plausible may still have an aspect within it that is very useful and meaningful. Different selection techniques can be used, including these three:

Carry forward multiple ideas into prototyping. If an idea is so far out there that it seems pointless to test, ask yourselves what about that solution was attractive, and then test that aspect or integrate it into a new solution.