Week 14: Visioning — Structuring the Ideation Process
“How do you catch a cloud and pin it down” — Sound of Music
Team Current has five team members all with wonderfully different forms of creativity, divergent analytical approaches, and vary levels of introversion. After many hours of scouring design toolkits, I realised one method does not work for all. Therefore, it is essential for a successful ideation plan to anticipate the varying needs of the whole team and the individuals. The past three weeks have been essential to my learning process, and taught me instrumental lessons in leading a creative team.
Structure.
Structure is key to a successful visioning process, and requires many hours of preparation. My teammate, Christyne, provided a useful piece of advice . — “write it out.” I loosely sketched out my plans to lead us through these past three weeks, however it would have been helpful to have a fully formed document to revisit from time to time. It is easy to lose sight of the goal in the middle of visioning, therefore vocalizing your intent before the process begins is extremely important.
My initial plan had a “build” session for each team member to complete, however we removed it due to time constraints. Although being aware of realistic time frame is very important, engaging people in different ways is equally important. Without the “build”, all our activities were grouped based, which can be problematic for people, who are independent or introverted thinkers. If I could revisit the creative plan, I would find different and less time consuming ways to engage people outside of the brainstorming sessions.
Toolkits.
Design toolkits were a great starting place for the team, and we adapted as our project needed. Many of these methods formed the backbone of our creative plan. However, I believe there is still room to improve!
Frog’s Collective Action Toolkit
Stanford d.School — Tools for Taking Action.
In Action.
Our team excelled with Warm-Up and Team Dynamic exercises, and had a lot of fun with the different methods. We held several brainstorming sessions and prototyped models of the museum.
When the team was ideating we often gained momentum on an idea that wasn’t planned. Therefore, rather than derail the momentum, we shift our focus. I found it useful to create a list of back up methods to be used on the spur of the moment.
Our Team also had a consistent pattern of completing the warm-up and first activity, and then a period of confusion while entering the second activity. The confusion usually arrived during our debrief and “critique” of the first activity. Therefore, learning how to facilitate and direct productive design critiques is essential.
Consensus.
Another difficulty our team often faced during the visioning process is reaching a consensus. It is extremely challenging to get five people equally excited about the same idea. We remained broad for to long, brainstorming a multitude of ideas. And rather than critically evaluating their strengths and weaknesses many ideas were simply lost due to time and memory. Frog’s Toolkit includes a sheet to be filled out at the end of every sessions on what your learned and what decisions you made and why. This is an absolute must for any visioning process because things are quickly forgotten, and it leads to talking in circles.
A few techniques and methods we did use to narrow the focus was storyboarding and speed dating ideas past our client. Also, several rounds of voting and listening to teammates.
Overall Team Current had a lot of fun during the visioning process and came up with several great ideas :)
