Hello and welcome back. Today I'll be talking about ideation. Which is actually coming up with all the ideas for designs from your formative work. Now, one theory behind ideation is that to come up with a few good ideas, you should generate a lot of ideas. So quantity is actually the way to get to quality. Now there's a few steps to a good ideation. And I really prefer doing this in a team, though it's also possible to do this by yourself with a piece of paper. So typically before the ideation, if you're doing this with a team, I prefer getting the team together. Deciding who should be on it, for example, stakeholders may be involved as part of your ideation. Or people with diverse skills, so like designers and social scientists. And programmers may all be part of the ideation session. Make sure that everybody is going to be involved thus familiar with the formative work result. So if you had your implications for design or your personas or your scenarios, go ahead and send those out to the team ahead of time, so that they're familiar with what they should be using to situate their ideas. Everybody should know the goals of a particular research session, a particular design session. Whether it is just blue sky brainstorming, ideas for the future based on implications for design, or if it's something specific, like there's a specific problem we're trying to solve, we hit a wall in terms of how to solve it. How would we go about going around it. And the other thing is very important. It's very important that everybody on your team is fairly comfortable with being silly with each other, because you're going to be coming up with a lot of ideas and not all of them are going to be good. So generally I actually prefer is there's some sort of hierarchy within your company like there's a boss. I prefer having the boss out of the room during the brainstorming session, because it can be very hard for people who sense a power differential, to actually be comfortable enough thhrowing out wild and crazy ideas. This style of brainstorming is known as IDEO-style brainstorming. IDEO is a company that basically does brainstorming for a living. Companies come to them as consultants and ask them to come up with crazy ideas. The goal in this case is to come up with a lot of ideas and there are seven rules that can guide action in this situation. So one, and this rule is very important and perhaps the hardest to enforce is to defer judgment. So in this case, you just want to come up with a lot of ideas. You don't want to necessarily have to come up with a lot of good ideas. The hope is that by coming up with many ideas, at least some of them would be good. So even if you hear an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. So let's say we're redesigning the shoe of the future, and I decided to make hover shoes even though physics say they'll never work. Or you think they'll never be safe or you think that people will never buy them. It doesn't matter it's an idea and we write it down and we move on. In fact you want to encourage wild ideas so I always show this picture of shoes. Because we don't usually think about shoes alongside interactive technology, but somehow every time I have a wild brain storming session with students. Eventually some sort of a shoe idea comes to the foreground comes on the board. And I think it's important that sometimes you want to actually throw out a silly idea as a facilitator to get the whole session going, so that people know that it's okay to throw something out that would never work or throw an idea out there that's kind of really out there like putting a screen in a shoe, or shoe hover boards, or robot shoes or something like that. Now part of this is actually building on each other's ideas. So let's say somebody says something that you don't think is going to work, like hover shoes. Instead of saying, ooh, that's never going to work, you should use the yes and rule, which is also common in improv. So the idea is you say, yes! Hover shoes! And maybe they can also, before we invent hoverboards, maybe we could also have shoes with wheels, so, like, Rollerblades. Now of course that's kind of an idea that's already out there. But the idea is that you take the idea that the other person have, you add something to it or you build on it in some way. And you change some little part of it in order to add something of your own to the idea. And you write down both ideas, both of those ideas will count as one number idea for your brainstorming session. The other rule is actually really important especially in focus brainstorming is staying focused on a topic so the pictures. Images here are of brainstorming sessions that we had around technology to support parent child communication. So the image on the left was from a kind of the images the ideas we selected from a larger brainstorming process that was more open ended. And then we decided to focus on this idea, camera projected systems for parent child communication. And then we conducted another brain storming that was more focused on that specific topic. How would you structure camera projected systems for parent child communication. And so what you're seeing on the right is a lot of different systems that we consider. So would this be something that's a table. Would this be something that's a tent, would this be something that would be a box, or a toy, or maybe a lamp? But all of them focused on this idea of projector camera systems for parent child communication. And this is kind of, hard as a facilitator because, on one hand, you want to defer judgement. On the other hand, if you're sensing that the group is getting away from the topic at hand, you want to kind of corral them back in and say. Let's get back to this idea of parent-child communication systems using camera projector systems. If they've gotten off on a topic of shoes, and it no longer involves The conversation of interest. But usually you've kind of the last five ideas have been off topic its a good point to step in and say okay lets get back to the topic of interest. Rule five is that you should only have one conversation at a time and in a long brainstorming session, where something has happened is that some idea will catch the interest of. Two or three people in the session, and they'll kind of start having their own conversation in the corner. And you really want to prevent that from happening, because then they can't add their ideas and build on the other ideas that are being currently thrown out in the session. So you really want to kind of corral them back in the session and say right now we're really building on the ideas that are already out there. If you want to build on any of the previous ideas, please throw out your idea as a new idea. Rule 6 is being visual. So if you watched one of my other videos, I talk about sketching as a really powerful way of communicating ideas, and that's one way of being visual. Other people actually prefer even having kind of physical props in their brainstorming sessions, whether that's lego's or construction paper. Whatever it is to help people communicate ideas that are not necessarily just on the phone with some gadget or device that is physical in nature. And all of these can really kind of help situate an idea and make it concrete so that other people can build on it. Rule seven and I think this is actually the most important rule, is going for quantity. So it's a little bit hard to see here, but what you see in the slide are the actual number ideas for coming up with technology to connect parents and children. And in an hour you definitely want to come up with more than 100 ideas. You want to number them as you go along, so you can know how far you're going through the process, and how many more you have left to go. And what I typically find is that at some point in the process, you'll hit a wall and you'll need to kind of break through that wall. And frequently it's after that point of thinking my gosh this can't possibly be anything else that we can add to this list. That some really interesting ideas, some ideas that other people haven't considered, really come to the surface. I think with any kind of design challenge, all of us have some kind of on the surface ideas, some initial ways that we might go about solving the design challenge, and those kind of get stuck in our heads. They're so loud that we can't get to the more interesting and more original ideas. And I think that's really the idea behind going for quantity. So you take those initial ideas and you put them down on paper. And once you get your initial quantity ideas out then you really have to start thinking hard about new and original solutions to problems. So I find this process very valuable. And it's also a great team building exercise. So, in general, you know that this process worked when you've received a wide variety of ideas for the given goal. So it's not just if you were looking at bluer sky ideas for and children, they're not all just Skype apps or Skype like apps. There's like a wide variety of things that these applications do and devices that they may run on. I also think it's a good sign when after the brainstorming nobody says that one was my idea. Typically when people start building on each other's ideas they very frequently forget exactly whose idea something was. It just feels like the whole team came up with the ideas that are on the board. And I think that's a very good sign. And also just at the end you feel like celebrating. You feel like you started this task that's very difficult, coming up with a hundred ideas in an hour for some specific technology topic based on your formative research and accomplishing it is a. Feels like an accomplishment because when you start it really feels improbable that you're going to come up with a hundred different ideas to support something. So overall, this is probably one of my favorite processes in human computer interaction in user interface design. If you'd like more information about it, there's two places, I think, that are very helpful. So, one is actually news segment about the company IDEO, where they show their process for redesigning the shopping cart in the store and they really, kind of followed through all of these IDEO ideas and these IDEO rules. Isn't coming up with their ideas. Also IDEO releases a set of method cards. These are cards that help inspire you and can help you have new ways of coming up with ideas for your team, because brainstorming is just one method of doing this. And these cards are available online. So if you go to the address here, you should be able to find them, and use them with your team as well. So, ideation, coming up with lots of ideas very quickly. And not worrying yet about whether they're good ideas or not. So that's all I have for you today and I hope to see you in a future video.
