I think for generating ideas you really need to let yourself walk all the way around the
problem and not be focused on the same things that people who have tried to address the
need in the past have focused on.
If you can find a way to look at the problem in a different way than others have in the
past then you can really generate some interesting concepts that are different from what's currently
out there when you walk into the first brainstorming
room and you have all these white walls and you’re trying to go for quantity, you start
to recognize that you know very little and you need to go back and learn more.
Not just about the anatomy or physiology, but also about the problem itself and the
best ways to solve it we did question storming in addition to brainstorming
…. … we tried to actually just have sessions
where all we were doing was throwing out questions trying to, you know, really capture everything
we would want to know in order to be able to generate as good a concept as possible.
CUT We tend to work best when we knew what the
plan for the brainstorming session was.
A lot of the times, we would have certain brainstorming sessions where we would throw
out wild ideas and try to connect as many disparate things as possible and then we had
other brainstorming sessions where we kinda drilled down on a little bit more details
of the design.
What we found helpful was to always start off looking at the problem and thinking of
different causes to the problem as a start.
Then the next brainstorm would focus on one cause of the problem and how we can solve
that one cause maybe.
We could only do pretty much two brainstorming sessions a day just because it’s so mentally
tiring Brainstorming sessions shouldn’t last beyond
40 minutes, or 45 minutes at least for me; because after 40 or 45 minutes, you would
be stagnant.
our brainstorm sessions were usually no longer than half an hour.
At that point, we started recognizing that we weren’t being productive.
It was getting a little bit frustrating.
Do it in the morning.
Have a lot of coffee, sugar, sweets to do it.
Everyone should focus and not bring in – basically have their whole mind and heart into the session
and it’s just probably an hour or so.
So no phones, no laptops.
We usually use a lot of Post-Its and we stand up and do it.
try to change the settings that you are in.
If you're always going to the same room, then you kind of always might end up thinking the
same kind of stuff.
Well it helped to be able to bucket concepts into similar groups and then there were some
groups we could just rule out immediately and that made it easier to not have to go
through 60 concepts individually.
So grouping helped and then usually we'd have one team member who was taking the lead on
that project present to the rest of the group what they thought of the, which concepts were
most viable, which ones needed a little bit more digging to see if there was some potential
there and then which ones were not gonna go anywhere.
to capture the output of the brainstorms, we took pictures with our iPhones and then
sent them around and then we put those, that information into a Mind Map of a bunch of
different ideas.
The Mind Map really helped us to determine where there were areas where we needed to
focus in on coming up with more ideas, areas that we’d missed.
My advice would be don’t get discouraged by recognizing the things that you don’t
know and feeling like you don’t have good solutions, but taking that and using it’s
fuel to figure out what the good solutions are
be open to solutions that at first blush you think won’t work.
bring in people who know nothing about what you’re talking about because they can say
one thing that leads you to another.
I find that seemingly very random connections can be really helpful.
Cast a wide net.
and the most important thing is to give respect to the others’ ideas.