Ideation

The sun went down a few hours ago, but we’re still going.

So far we have broken down the brief, completed some desk research and explored human experiences based on our own personal experiences. We used this information to identify insights of the challenges facing SLC and different aspects of the problem domain. From this information we identified some key themes. We then used our own personal experiences to speculate on people’s experiences within the problem domain and used insights identified from these experiences to verify our existing themes and identify possible holes in our exploration.

Our next step was to start the process of coming up with possible solutions.

Method

As students working within a design research area we have collaboratively been developing some methods to help us with different apsects of the design process. One of these methods originated from an idea to help with brainstorming.

Sometimes, having a completely blank canvas as a starting point for solutions can be paralysing. Where do you start.

The game board with the ring of requirements.

One method we have been playing with is the idea of using cards as prompts and limits of thinking. We developed a “game board” that creates a ring of requirements — key factors important for the solution that we are creating. We then create cards that provide key elements of:

• An area of focus for a solution
• A particular type of person or group of people
• Some kind of constraint

The contents of these cards come from the analysis that we have conducted up to this point — in this case our organic mapping of the challenges, problem domain and human experiences. Cards are randomly selected, placed onto the board, and a time limit set within which each person in the team (working independently) comes up with as many solutions as they can. The usual rules of brainstorming apply: there’s no such thing as a bad idea, discussion around concepts is critical, all discussion must be constructive.

Results

We completed four rounds of our ideation method.

Round 1: People are explorers or browsers, Contraing is “beyond the library” and Focus is visibility and breadth of resources.

Round 2: People is strangers, Focus is “create, make, use, add” and Constraint is “help people find”

Round 3: People is “public”, Focus is “the value of sharing knowledge” and Constraint is “public space”

Round 4: People is “a community”, Focus is “accessibility” in a broad sense, and Constraint is “take-away”

Concepts

We compiled the concepts that we came up with onto a separate sheet along with the prompting cards that were used for those ideas.

How we used these

We adopted a process again based on dotmocracy where each of us was able to indicate our preferences for the concepts to be taken further.

Importantly, the placing of dots was not the most beneficial part of this process. Rather it was the discussion that happened at the same time. We explained our thinking, talked about different possibilities and considered how concepts could be made better (particularly though borrowing and combining aspects of other concepts). Really the concepts were seeds not only of ideas but also for guiding our thinking.

Based on these discussions, we have selected one concept to be developed further. But more on that in the next post.