Designing Social Change kicked off last night and because of the diversity of backgrounds and experiences, I like to start the course with an exercise where we engage divergent thinking when approaching a problem we want to solve (instead of defaulting to our typical convergent posture). In this case, we sought to re-imagine common objects. Before we look to tackle something more intensive, we want to be sure we have the ability to frame something that is a little less complex. For this class, it was a Ziploc bag, a fork, chopsticks and a bulldog clip.
To facilitate this process, I draw on the resources of IDEO (and the d.school) to help students brainstorm in a new way:
#1 Defer judgment: there are no bad ideas at this point because there's plenty of time to judge after
#2 Encourage wild ideas: it's the wild ideas that often provide the breakthroughs and we can always bring ideas down to earth later, we need new paths for non obvious ideas
#3 Build on the ideas of others: think 'and' rather than 'but'
#4 Stay focused on topic: you get better output if everyone is disciplined
#5 One conversation at a time: that way all ideas can be heard and built upon
#6 Be visual: sometimes a picture really can speak a thousand words
#7 Go for quantity, not quality: set an outrageous goal and surpass it!
We also had a virtual guest! Tim Brown's TED Talk is a lovely way to introduce the ideas of design thinking to a multi-disciplinary team.
02 March 2011
Brainstorm 101
Posted by Unknown at 12:34 PM
Tags design, ecuad, social change
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment