Fewer things are more stressful than being pressured to generate great, creative ideas on the spot. It can often seem that the more you try to force creativity, the more often you come up short.
As a creative person, this is something I struggle with. More often than not, I find that my best ideas come to me when I’m not trying to think of them – they’ll formulate when I’m doing ordinary, everyday tasks like taking a shower, driving, or walking to the mailbox. I’ve heard it said that the reason why epiphanies can occur during these mundane moments is because our brains are in a somewhat relaxed state. Because the everyday tasks we do don’t require much brainpower, our brains have the opportunity to passively generate insights and ideas even while we’re engaged in other activities. But we can’t always schedule boring (yet apparently brain-stimulating) activities into our daily work lives. More often, we’re responsible for actively ideating at the drop of a hat – not to mention, making sure those ideas are top-notch. Fortunately, the act of ideating comes in a variety of flavors. There’s no need to fret about staring blankly at a pad of paper, waiting for brilliant ideas to manifest. Rikke Dam and Teo Siang, authors for the Interaction Design Foundation, share some creative ways to creatively ideate in their article “Introduction to the Essential Ideation Techniques which are the Heart of Design Thinking.” Among my favorite include “brain-dumping,” brainwriting, storyboarding, and mind-mapping. General brainstorming involves “leverage[ing] the synergy of the group to reach new ideas by building on others’ ideas,” Dam and Siang write. Brain-dumping is a form of brainstorming, however, it is done in a solitary setting before the ideas are shared with the rest of the group. Brainwriting goes back to the group aspect of brainstorming; it involves each person writing down their ideas that are then passed along to the next group member, who will expand on the first person’s idea(s). Storyboarding fleshes out ideas from start to finish, using illustrations and other visual elements to bring an idea to life. Lastly, mind-mapping explores the relationships between ideas. Whether you’re brainstorming, brain-dumping, storyboarding, or going on a jog to get the creative juices flowing, Aurora Harley writes in her commentary, “Ideation for Everyday Design Challenges” that what all the above ideation methods have in common is three specific criteria:
Harley defines the ideation process as “generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them.” “Evaluation stifles creativity,” Harley continues, and that “working with a group often generates a greater number and variety of ideas.” She believes that too much emphasis is placed on quality over quantity, however when it comes to ideation, more importance should be placed on the number of ideas created. After all, it’s far easier to work with several ideas that may contain some golden nuggets than to be limited to one or two ideas that may ultimately be unusable. A certain analogy springs to mind as I muse the topic of ideation. Normally, the phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks” isn’t used in positive contexts. However, that’s exactly how I envision the ideation process. It’s a tall order to expect the first or even the first several ideas we come up with to be winners. Ideation entails throwing out every idea we have until something lands. It’s important for designers to remember this and to not get hung up on the idea that only logical/perfect/fleshed out ideas are allowed in the ideation process.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |