IDEATION
IDEA FLUENCY VS. FLEXIBILITY
In my Entrepreneurship class that I teach to high schoolers at Marymount School of New York, I focus on Ideation in the first few weeks. In my classes, I emphasize the importance of having bad ideas as well as good ones. We talk about idea fluency (the speed and quantity of ideas) vs. Idea flexibility (ideas that are truly different and distinctive). I use many activities to get this IDEAFLOW going with my students. Getting them into the habit of idea fluency can be tough because this is just not part of their muscle memory or daily routine.
I take the students through daily activities to activate their idea fluency. Activities like 30 circles — the goal of this activity is to come up with ideas for turning circles into recognizable objects. Another activity we do is using the game DISRUPTUS, where the students select two cards (contain images or icons) from the deck. They then take elements from each card (images/icons), combine them so the new object solves for a different problem. I also do a lot of mindmapping. I find this also helps them to come up with ideas. Other ideation activities can be found here and here.
A few weeks after they have been doing ideation activities, I point out the design thinking hexagon cycle to them again and tell them we are going to do an activity that will introduce them to all the other steps in the design thinking cycle- empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The activity I use for this comes from the dSchool and is called redesigning your partner’s morning routine.
Redesigning the Morning Routine is an activity that takes you through the full design thinking cycle in an hour. Students practice interview skills, reframe the problem, ideate, build and test and then reflect on their work. This is a great activity for students as an introduction to design thinking, and the topic of “morning routine” is a topic they are interested in.
