Ideation Toolkit

What are the biggest pains that cause problems, unmet needs, or wants? 

Painstorming identifies problems that need to be solved. Students think about problems, hazards, frustrations, faults, anomalies, worries, and concerns. They seek to create a better value proposition for existing products. 

For instance, what’s annoying you about the airline seat in front of you?

Want to "go wide" with your concepts and outcomes while keeping your ideas organized?

Ideation gives you both the drive and the material to provide solutions for your users. Using Edward de Bono’s Concept Fan technique, students approach ideation from a broad view of concepts and approaches that meet the directive, while generating alternatives to grow the list of ideas.

Students will organize their ideas while ensuring they’ve considered the full conceptual design space, looking for remaining gaps.

Want to be a game-changer with a new product or service? 

Move beyond association to bisociation! Make connections between an ideation topic and a random stimulus to blend these seemingly unrelated concepts into new patterns and products. 

If a shark photo can lead to the design of special sterile medical instruments and algae-resistant coating on boats, what could your students create? You never know where a photo will lead!

Is your product good enough to make it in the marketplace? 

Regarding business viability, the Will it Fly Scorecard provides a nice framework for decision making. It is a systematic method to assess the viability of a proposal. 

Use it to find out if your proposal is more likely to “fly” or to “crash and burn”!

How would you justify your choice? 

The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a decision matrix where you define criteria, prioritize criteria, assign weights to the criteria, perform a pairwise comparison, organize data into a chart, rate each design against the criteria, and calculate scores for each design option.