Ideation techniques and concept selection notes — Unit 3

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.

⇒1.1 The Goal

The goal is not to find the single best solution immediately. The goal is to generate the maximum volume of ideas, spanning from obvious to absurd, to create a massive pool of raw material to work with.

Quantity > Quality.

If you just put 5 people in a room and say 'think of ideas', it usually fails. The loudest person dominates, and people self-censor. IDEO established 7 strict rules for brainstorming.

• 1. Defer Judgment: Do not criticize any idea. (No 'that's too expensive').
• 2. Encourage Wild Ideas: It is easier to tone down a crazy idea than to make a boring idea interesting.
• 3. Build on the Ideas of Others: Use 'Yes, and...' instead of 'But...'
• 4. Stay Focused on the Topic: Always point back to the HMW (How Might We) question.
• 5. One Conversation at a Time: Let people finish their thought.
• 6. Be Visual: Draw it on a post-it.
• 7. Go for Quantity: Set a target (e.g., 100 ideas in 20 minutes).

Vocal brainstorming has a flaw: introverts often get overpowered by extroverts, and 'anchoring bias' occurs (the first idea mentioned anchors everyone else's thinking).

⇒3.1 Brainwriting (The Solution)

Everyone gets a stack of post-it notes and a sharpie. For the first 10 minutes, there is absolute silence. Everyone writes/draws their ideas individually. Only after the time is up do people place them on the wall and discuss.

This guarantees every single team member has an equal voice, and prevents groupthink.

A structured ideation technique used to spark creativity by forcing you to look at an existing product or problem through 7 specific lenses.

• Substitute: Can we swap a material, process, or person? (e.g., Substitute beef with plant-based protein).
• Combine: Can we merge two features? (e.g., Phone + Camera = Smartphone).
• Adapt: Can we borrow an idea from a completely different industry? (e.g., Drive-thru windows adapted for pharmacies).
• Modify/Magnify/Minify: Make it huge or tiny. (e.g., Minify a computer into an Apple Watch).

• Put to another use: Can this be used by a different demographic? (e.g., Memory foam, invented for NASA astronauts, put to use in mattresses).
• Eliminate: What can we completely remove to simplify it? (e.g., Eliminate the headphone jack).
• Reverse/Rearrange: What if we do the exact opposite of what is normal? (e.g., Fast food restaurants reversed the normal dining process: pay first, eat second).

A core exercise from the Google Design Sprint methodology, used to force rapid ideation.

⇒6.1 The Process

• Take a standard piece of A4 paper.
• Fold it in half three times so you have 8 distinct rectangles.
• Set a timer for exactly 8 minutes.
• Each person must sketch 8 completely distinct ideas (one per rectangle). That is 1 idea per minute.

The extreme time pressure shuts down the analytical, self-censoring part of the brain. The first 3 ideas are usually obvious. By idea 7 and 8, the brain is forced to invent truly weird, potentially brilliant concepts.

Sometimes a team hits a creative wall and gets stuck in boring, safe thinking. This technique flips the psychology.

⇒7.1 The Prompt

Instead of asking 'How do we solve this?', you ask: 'How do we absolutely guarantee this fails horribly?'

Example: (Goal: Improve hotel check-in). 'Worst Idea: Make them wait in line for an hour, lose their reservation, and yell at them.'

⇒7.2 The Flip

Once the team is laughing and energized by creating terrible ideas, you take those terrible ideas and reverse them. (e.g., 'What is the mathematical opposite of making them wait in line? Let's build a geofence that checks them in automatically when their Uber pulls up').

Innovation is rarely inventing something out of thin air; it is usually taking two existing, unrelated things and combining them.

⇒8.1 How it works

You take your problem space, and forcefully combine it with a completely random, wildly successful brand or concept.

Prompt: 'How would Disney design a hospital waiting room?'

This forces the team to borrow principles (like Disney's queuing entertainment, character interactions, and immersive storytelling) and apply them to a sterile medical environment.

After a good ideation session, you will have 100+ post-it notes on the wall. You cannot prototype 100 ideas. You must now switch from Divergent thinking (creating choices) to Convergent thinking (making choices).

⇒9.1 The Danger

Teams often default to picking the safest, easiest, most boring idea to build. This kills the innovation process. You need structured frameworks to ensure you select the boldest ideas that still solve the user's problem.

The simplest and fastest way to democratically narrow down a massive board of ideas.

⇒10.1 The Rules

• Every team member gets exactly 3 to 5 small sticker dots.
• In silence, they walk up to the wall and place their dots on the ideas they think have the most potential.
• You can put all 3 dots on one amazing idea, or spread them out.
• The ideas with the most dots move forward.

To protect innovation, you can give people specific dots. (e.g., Red dot for 'Most likely to succeed', Blue dot for 'Most crazy but breakthrough').

A 2x2 matrix used to plot the surviving ideas based on two axes: Originality (Normal vs Crazy) and Feasibility (Easy vs Hard).

• NOW (Normal/Easy): Ideas that are easy to implement but not very innovative. Good for quick wins, but won't disrupt the market.
• HOW (Crazy/Hard): Highly innovative, but technologically or financially impossible right now. (Keep them in the backlog for 5 years from now).
• WOW (Crazy/Easy): The Sweet Spot. Ideas that are highly original and breakthrough, but surprisingly feasible to build. Focus your prototyping here.

To ensure the team doesn't just pick the safest idea, you force them to select one idea from each of four distinct categories.

• 1. The Most Rational: The logical, safe, expected solution.
• 2. The Most Delightful: The solution the user would absolutely fall in love with, regardless of logic.
• 3. The Darling: The team's personal favorite pet project.
• 4. The Long Shot: The highest risk, highest reward, 'crazy' idea.

You take these 4 ideas into the prototyping phase. Often, pieces of the Long Shot get merged with the Rational idea to create the final product.

Before you build a prototype, you must identify what could cause your idea to fail. Every idea is built on unproven assumptions.

⇒13.1 Mapping the Risks

Plot all assumptions on a 2x2 grid:

• X-Axis: Known vs Unknown.
• Y-Axis: Low Risk vs High Risk.

The assumptions that land in the Unknown + High Risk quadrant are your 'Leap of Faith Assumptions' (LOFAs). Your prototype MUST be designed specifically to test these assumptions first, before you write a single line of production code.

Before building a physical prototype, you must map out the user's experience with the idea over time. Borrowed from the film industry, a storyboard is a comic-strip-like sequence of drawings.

⇒14.1 Key Elements

• The Trigger: What happens right before they use the product?
• The Action: How do they use it?
• The Climax: What is the moment of maximum value/delight?
• The Resolution: How does it end?

Storyboarding forces the team to think about the entire ecosystem of the solution, not just the UI screen.

Sometimes drawing isn't enough. Bodystorming involves team members physically acting out the proposed solution like a theater play.

⇒15.1 Why do it?

When you design a digital kiosk for a hospital waiting room on a whiteboard, it looks great. When you role-play it, you suddenly realize the 'patient' is holding a crying baby and only has one free hand, making your complex touch-screen interface unusable.

Bodystorming reveals physical and spatial constraints instantly.

A great way to synthesize the chosen idea before prototyping is to create a 'Concept Poster'.

⇒16.1 Elements of the Poster

• Catchy Name: Gives the project an identity.
• The Tagline: A one-sentence summary of the value.
• Who is it for? (The Persona).
• What problem does it solve? (The POV).
• How does it work? (3 simple steps or a sketch).
• Why will it fail? (The biggest assumption).

This acts as a north-star document for the team.

When selecting concepts in a corporate environment, teams face the Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen).

• Sustaining Innovation: Making existing products slightly better (e.g., iPhone 14 to iPhone 15). Safe, profitable, favored by management.
• Disruptive Innovation: A completely new, often cheaper, lower-quality initial product that entirely redefines the market (e.g., early Netflix destroying Blockbuster). High risk, usually rejected by management.

Design Thinking aims to find Disruptive Innovations, which is why protecting 'crazy' ideas during selection is so critical.

A famous writing advice quote that applies perfectly to design.

⇒18.1 Emotional Attachment

Often, a designer comes up with a brilliant, complex idea. But during assumption mapping, it becomes clear the user doesn't actually need it. The designer will often fight to keep the idea alive because they are proud of the cleverness of it.

You must detach your ego from the idea. If the concept doesn't serve the user's core need (from the Define phase), you must ruthlessly kill it, no matter how cool the technology is.

Coined by Alberto Savoia (Google), pretotyping happens between Ideation and Prototyping.

⇒19.1 The Goal

Before building a working prototype to see how it works, build a fake 'pretotype' to see if anyone would even buy it if it did work.

Example (The Fake Door): You have an idea for a premium feature. Instead of spending 2 weeks coding a prototype of the feature, you spend 10 minutes adding a 'Premium Upgrade' button to the live site. When users click it, a pop-up says 'Coming Soon!'. If 0 people click the button, you kill the idea without ever building it.

By the end of the Ideation phase, the team has expanded their thinking to generate hundreds of solutions, and then used structured frameworks to ruthlessly narrow them down to 1 or 2 bold, human-centered concepts.

They have identified the most dangerous assumptions holding those concepts up. They are now ready to enter the most iconic phase of Design Thinking: Prototyping.