3.2. Ideation/Co-creation Tools

3.2. Ideation/Co-creation Tools

● Brainstorming/Brainwriting The term ‘brainstorming’ comes from the book Applied Imagination (1967) by Alex Faickney Osborn. Today, for many people, brainstorming is considered overrated, often misunderstood and has also earned infamous reviews. Osborn has drawn attention to two important aspects of brainstorming, the first being to postpone the evaluation and the second to focus on quantity rather than specific ideas.

Osborn goes on to suggest a few principles that will help you conduct an effective brainstorming session: 1. Quantity over quality. Create, as a group, as many ideas as possible. With as many ideas as possible, it will be easier to choose and create new, valuable ideas. 2. Encourage participants to add ideas, build their ideas on those of others, change the ideas of other group members and add different variations. 3. Encourage participants to add even "stupid" or wild ideas. Perhaps at first the group might be hesitant but it may inspire others to add new solutions 4. And the most crucial rule: In the first part of brainstorming we don't judge ideas, participants should focus on creating new ideas and not on defending and translating them. This analysis will come in the next part of brainstorming, during the evaluation, after you have a lot of ideas.

● 10 x 10 (means 10 variations of one idea)

So you come up with an idea that looks like THE IDEA. But you can develop it to it’s biggest potential! As a group, create 10 variations of the idea, you can add or change some elements as needed. Think what you can do to make this idea even better. This exercise can be done after selectioning the best idea. It will help you with ideation and how you can improve or build new ideas based on the chosen one.

● Crazy 8 Another exercise which can help you generate more ideas, and see things from another perspective is Crazy 8. Divide A4 paper page into 8 spaces. Draw (or describe), in each square, one idea: solution of the problem. For each drawing, you have 1 minute. To stimulate ideation, for each space you should prepare 8 questions. For example : - How would your mother solve this problem? - How would your government solve it? - How would Google solve it? - How would IKEA solve it?

● Importance/ Feasibility Matrix

This exercise will help you validate your ideas, check what is possible to do (feasibility), and which one idea will have the biggest positive impact on your user (= will solve his/her problem). The most feasible ideas with the highest impact should be the one you should prototype, test and validate with users. 16

● Concept poster To solidify your idea, make it visual. You can do this by making a concept poster. The main concept of this prototype is to provide general information about your idea in a clear way. It’s important to keep in mind that your poster should include information about your idea, how it will work, for whom it’s designed and what is the unique value of your service.

16 https://app.mural.co/template/94238f11-00b5-42c7-8374-b3dd7c7c0b76/ae150568-42bf46cc-b205-2f4ba1bdb4ca