Ideate

Once your design team knows what problems you want to focus on, you engage in idea generation to explore a wide variety and large quantity of ideas that go beyond the obvious solutions to the problem.

This process of abductive reasoning helps us to infer meaning and redefine problems to generate new solutions.

What steps can you take to ensure that we are redefining problems and creating new insights into the problems of a development challenge?

Ideate

Use the tools and resources in this guidebook to accomplish the goals below. Once your design team has achieved these objectives, you will be in a strong position to advance to the next phase in your design process. Use the reflection tools in the Design Work Journal to evaluate whether your design team is ready to move to the next phase.

Get inspired by reviewing your teams' stakeholder needs and the big ideas identified thus far

Prepare the materials your team will need to brainstorm, either in person or virtually

Review the Rules of Brainstorming to help ensure your team generates the most creative solutions possible

Review and select the HMW questions that your team is most excited to brainstorm

Begin the ideation process by brainstorming individually and then transition to brainstorming as a group in order to build momentum and generate lots of out of the box ideas

Cluster the ideas you generated into themes and then evaluate the clusters using the different criteria included in the tools

Narrow down to three of the most innovative ideas using the criteria included in the tools

Select the most promising idea based on your stakeholders' needs and begin to sketch out some of the details of the idea

Overview of Ideate phase

Mindsets of Ideate phase

Many ideas lead to good ideas
Defer judgment and criticism of ideas
Idea generation is not the time for evaluating ideas
Brainstorming is a collaborative team activity
Allow yourself to think of wild ideas
See opportunities in constraints
This phase is the time to solve the problem

Overview of Ideate phase

The tools in the Ideate Phase of the process are focused on generating as many solutions to a problem as possible. Once many solutions have been generated, members of your team will select one to four ideas to move forward to prototyping.

This is a collaborative process and should be completed as a team in order to maximise your team’s creative energy and momentum.

Objectives of Ideate phase

The goal of this phase is to use the POV statements and HMW Questions from the last phase to generate as many relevant solutions as possible. By generating lots of solutions, your team is more likely to think outside of the box and arrive at truly innovative solutions.

From there, the team will use criteria to select ideas that have clustered into themes. At the end of this phase, all team members should be clear on one to four ideas that you are interested in prototyping.