This week was all about ideation methods ****for our major project. We tried some of these out in class together. The first method was:
Worst way
This simply involved coming up with the worst solution to a problem. This helps to relieve the pressure of coming up with a good solution and prevents people worry that their idea won’t work. The solution we were trying to “solve” here was “How might we relieve stress in a working environment?”.
Some of the ideas included working more hours and multiple ways to make the environment loud and distracting. This was a fun exercise to loosen us up and get our brains thinking creatively.
Doing this activity has the potential to spark ideas for actual solutions to this problem if you revert the answers. For example, instead of creating a loud environment, perhaps there could be a quiet room for focus time. I want to use this method in future at the beginning of an ideation session to encourage me to be creative.
Mindmapping
This is a method I was more familiar with and have used before. However, doing this as a large group unlocked so many more ideas and solutions than I could have done alone. This showed me how important it is to get other peoples perspective. When thinking about my major project going forward, I am definitely going to reach out to others to get their opinions and ideas.
There were many other ideation methods including, sketching, brainstorming, connections and negative brainstorming. In the coming weeks, I want to try out as many of these as possible to see what ideas can come from it.