During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to "think outside the box" to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem.
4. What is Ideating?
Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions
through sessions such as Sketching,
Prototyping, Brainstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and a
wealth of other ideation techniques. Ideation is also the third stage in
the Design Thinking process.
Ideation Will Help You:
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5. Ideation Will Help You:
▷ Ask the right questions and innovate with a strong focus on
your users, their needs, and your insights about them.
▷ Step beyond the obvious solutions and therefore increase
the innovation potential of your solution.
▷ Bring together perspectives and strengths of your team
members.
▷ Uncover unexpected areas of innovation.
▷ Create volume and variety in your innovation options.
▷ Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team
beyond them.
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6. ““Ideation is the mode of the design process in
which you concentrate on idea generation.
Mentally it represents a process of ‘going
wide’ in terms of concepts and outcomes.
Ideation provides both the fuel and also the
source material for building prototypes and
getting innovative solutions into the hands of
your users.”
– D.school, An Introduction to Design
Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
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8. The role of Ideation
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that too many ideas leave
you confused, directionless, or unable to make a decision, your
goal here should be quantity not quality.
And here is the best part: no idea is a bad idea. Go after weird,
unusual ideas instead of common sense solutions. Do you know
how many indispensable innovations that you can’t imagine life
without have come from unusual, nonsensical, unreasonable,
bold, impossible ideas?
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9. ▷ It sounds counterintuitive and counterproductive but in
Design Thinking this is the zone of endless creative
possibilities. It is better to have a surplus of ideas than to
have to just enough ideas. A diversity of ideas will bring
about the best, most creative and appropriate solution.
▷ During Ideation you release your mind from the mentality of
“finding a right solution”, get the obvious solution out of the
way, and embrace the broadest possibilities available to you
through this process. Ideation is about exploring all varieties
of ideas by multiple voices in the team. You get to ask the
right questions and discover unexpected areas of
innovation.
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10. 10
▷ Ideation comprises both divergent and convergent
thinking. Divergent thinking is creating and
generating numerous choices. Convergent thinking is
narrowing down and zeroing in on a handful of very
specific choices that are most likely to solve the
problem. Convergent thinking involves synthesis.
Convergent thinking is also analytical.
▷ Convergent and divergent thinking is a continuous
process through out the ideation stage and the
whole problem solving process of Design Thinking.
The team may discover that it needs to go back and
do more research in order to redefine the problem
again. It is a process that is always ongoing.
Divergent and Convergent
Thinking
12. Tools for Idea generation
There are many tools for ideation. The most common
being brainstorming
▷ Brainstorming
▷ How might we?
▷ Body storming
▷ Game storming
▷ Mind Maps
▷ Analogous Inspiration
▷ Sketchboards
We’ll be focusing on Brainstorming, How might we?, Mind Maps, and
Analogous Inspiration.
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14. 14
Conventional group problem solving can often be
undermined by unhelpful group behavior . And while it's
important to start with a structured, analytical
process when solving problems, this can lead a group to
develop limited and unimaginative ideas.
By contrast, brainstorming provides a free and open
environment that encourages everyone to participate.
Quirky ideas are welcomed and built upon, and all
participants are encouraged to contribute fully, helping
them develop a rich array of creative solutions.
Power of Brainstorming
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When used during problem solving, brainstorming
brings team members' diverse experience into play. It
increases the richness of ideas explored, which means
that you can often find better solutions to the problems
that you face.
It can also help you get buy-in from team members for
the solution chosen – after all, they're likely to be more
committed to an approach if they were involved in
developing it. What's more, because brainstorming is
fun, it helps team members bond, as they solve problems
in a positive, rewarding environment.
While brainstorming can be effective, it's important to
approach it with an open mind and a spirit of non-
judgment. If you don't do this, people "clam up," the
number and quality of ideas plummets, and morale can
suffer.
17. In two or three columns
Yellow
Is the color of gold, butter
and ripe lemons. In the
spectrum of visible light,
yellow is found between
green and orange.
Blue
Is the colour of the clear sky
and the deep sea. It is
located between violet and
green on the optical
spectrum.
Red
Is the color of blood, and
because of this it has
historically been associated
with sacrifice, danger and
courage.
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19. 19
A mind map is a tool for the brain that captures the
thinking that goes on inside your head. Mind mapping
helps you think, collect knowledge, remember and
create ideas. Most likely it will make you a better
thinker.
Mind maps can be created in many different ways, but
they share the same basics
Mind Mapping
20. Central theme
A central theme is placed in the centre of a
blank page. This is the title, the subject, a
problem or just a thought. When thinking
of something images automatically take
form in your head. For example the image
of a “colorful bunch of balloons” when
thinking of “birthday”..
Basics of Mind Mapping
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21. 21
Associations
From the central theme associations
radiate out. Associations directly from the
central theme are called first level
associations. Then second level
associations are created, third level and so
on. The brain thinks by imagination and
association. When associations are
created, connections are made. These
connections are essential for
remembering and thinking.
Curved Lines
Associations are often drawn as curved
lines. They are curved rather than
straight, because the brain likes curves.
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Keywords
Mind maps summarize information.
Instead of sentences, ideally only single
keywords are used. A single word per
association gives more freedom, creativity
and clarity.
Colour and Images
The use of color is important in the mind
map. Research shows that people who use
color and images in their imagination,
when they are learning, are better in
remembering than those who don’t.
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Hospital emergency rooms have been inspired by F1 pit stop
crews. Henry Ford's assembly line was inspired by observing
systems within slaughterhouses and grain warehouses.
Executives, artists, writers and all kinds of other creative
professionals have relied on creating analogies as a powerful
tool for empathising with audiences and communicating and
sparking ideas. An analogy is a comparison between two
things—for instance, a comparison of a heart to a pump. We
communicate in analogies all the time, as they allow us to
express our ideas or to explain complex matters in an
understandable and motivating way.
Analogous Inspiration
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The ideation technique of using analogies goes by many
names. Essentially, it all boils down to
exploring unrelated concepts for an insight, which you
can apply to your own problem's context. These insights
on how principles or characteristics exist within one
context may help inform how to reshape these principles
and solutions within a different context. Purposely
stoking ideation teams to dig for analogies gets them
thinking about the attributes of the elements they are
working on in a different way. It will help the team seek
inspiration in problem solving, reconfigure the design
problem and come up with unconventional solutions.
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How to pick an idea when opinions differ?
Take pieces of paper
Ask each member to score each idea on a scale of 1-5
Take everyone’s score and select the idea with the
highest score
Difference in opinion
