Ideation Strategies or ‘How to Come Up With Ideas’
Deploying ideation Strategies will help you and your team generate a much greater number of innovative solutions to your design problem. Choosing one, or several techniques and using them correctly, can yield better results.
1. Crazy Eights
Using ‘crazy eights’ as an ideation strategy.
For this strategy. Each member of the team has 8 minutes to come up with eight ideas. Draw, written or both. Freedom and creativity of ideas should be encouraged… it doesn’t matter how wild or impractical the ideas are. Sketches and notes should be quick and free.
The greater the number of ideas, the better. As peoples’ first idea is likely not to be the best solution. To think more broadly: people can be asked to generate ideas in 3 categories called the 3 ‘P’s:
‘Potty’ (crazy ideas) e.g. pillboxes delivered by drone daily.
Even seemingly naive or crazy ideas often lead to the best practical solutions and force people to think creatively.
‘Personal’ (shape it around their own personal experience or memory) e.g. I know my Grandma struggles to read the small print on bottles.
‘Practical’ (think logically about how an aspect of the design might work in reality). This forces the individual to think about sub-sets of the problem space e.g. How are bottles labelled and packaged at the moment and why? What type do they use? What colours?
Write the problem clearly on a sheet of paper and then draw boxes or use post-it notes for the individual ideas. You can draw or write responses, but it is actually easier to do this on post-it notes so that you can use them later, in different parts of the design process e.g. affinity diagramming. The task should be completed in silence so that people can concentrate on their own idea generation.
2. Worst ideas
Ask team members to focus on generating terrible ideas only. They should consider everything that wouldn’t work before you ask “What solutions can we think of to solve these problems?”
This method reduces or removes the fear of criticism and frees the flow of discussion because bad ideas are easier to find — which makes the initial idea generation easier. Plus, it can be super fun.
3. Brainwriting
This technique is great if you want to encourage team members to generate and iterate on initial ideas.
· Give each participant a sheet of paper and ask them to generate 3 ideas in five minutes.
· Pass all papers to the right.
· Ask each participant to build on his colleague’s ideas, improving them or using them as inspiration to generate another three ideas.
· Continue passing papers to the right until they reach their original participant.
With all the ideas gathered, discuss each one, improving and building on those that the group feels has promise.
4. Eliminate constraints
Constrains can stifle our thinking and idea generation. Naturally, we consider constraints as soon as an idea forms, so eliminating even some of these constraints can encourage creative idea generation; for example, ask participants “What if there is no gravity, how can we improve the flying experience?”.
You’ll find creative ideas abound, and, sometimes, those apparently infeasible ideas can be adjusted to deliver some deeply creative and innovative solutions.
Break it down…
You can break down more complex design problems into individual ‘ideation tasks’, framed by the different problem areas.
So, for example, ‘supporting journalism’ might be broken down into different ideation sprints of ‘ways we can engage users with journalism’ and ‘innovative advertising methods to fund journalism’, ‘digital concepts’ and ‘physical concepts’.
Presenting and next steps
After the allotted time each team member can either share all ideas with the group or the group can then make a collective vote on their favourite ideas. Furthermore, ideas can be combined with other team members for further ideation or the development (iteration) of an idea.
Alternatively, and this works well for larger groups. Individuals can select, present and justify their 2 favourite ideas.
It is then best to digitise your results in a document. We personally use Miro for this.
Conclusion
Whilst choosing a technique consider your goals, objectives and the type of ideas you are hoping to generate. Hopefully, this brief article has helped explain ideation strategies in more detail. If you know of any other successful strategies, please comment below so we can keep sharing as a community, I would love to hear them!
Thanks for reading, please clap if you have enjoyed the article and feel free to follow Diagraam Design for practical help and advice on applying design thinking and the design process.
Elliott
Diagraam Design
