Well design and sometimes done as an individual. It's often done in groups as well, when you are part of an organization or a team that's trying to create an artifact, and so one of the challenges you face as a designer or as a design leader is how do you deploy the effort of several individuals towards the goal for exploring the design concepts. The normal organisational practice is to call a meeting and to conduct a brain storming session. And the basic idea behind brainstorming issue get a group of people particularly three to eight around a table maybe you have a flip chart, and an easel, or a whiteboard and someone facilitates the meeting and there is a group you generate ideas Now, I exaggerate only slightly in saying that's the, probably the single worst thing you can do as a designer or as a design leader in order to effectively deploy a group of individuals towards the goal of exploring effectively for design concepts. Let me make an analogy, Imagine that you and three other people are on a desert landscape and you are looking for gold. Let's say, you are miners and you are doing some exploration to find gold. Now, imagine two alternatives, One alternative is that you all huddle together and you wander around as a group. And, three of you watch a fourth person dig and do exploration. That's effectively what we do in a meeting or in a group setting when we generate ideas together. The other alternative is that all four of you go off in different directions, and after awhile you come back and report what you found. And maybe you go together to explore the more promising areas that each of you found individually. Exploring and design as a group only is a lot like trying to work in a rugby scrum. The group is essentially limited to move together and to explore a fairly limited number of alternatives. A much better approach is to send everyone off in different directions. At least for some of the, the time you've allotted to exploration. You don't have to take my word for it. I've, with some colleagues, we've actually done scientific research that has tested this idea experimentally. Let me just tell you a little bit about that experiment. We compared two different approaches. One we called the group approach, where four people worked together for 30 minutes. And the other called the hybrid approach, where those same four people worked for ten minutes alone as individuals, independently and in parallel and then those four people worked together for twenty minutes, exploring the ideas that they generated alone, as individuals. We did this with 44 individuals divided into eleven groups of four. And we had them work on ex-, exploring for alternatives in two different product design problems. We found that with the hybrid approach. The same four individuals could generate about two and half times more ideas if they worked in the hybrid. If they took the hybrid approach than if they worked together at the, at a table as a group. Not only that, but the ideas they generated were actually better in quality as well. Here are some basic guidelines for coordinating your group and exploration for design. There's unambiguous evidence that a hybrid process is better than a group process. And that you need to have an individual phase for at least some of your exploration effort. You need to take your, have your individuals work independently and parallel to generate or to explore for design alternatives. Second guideline is that it's very helpful to provide a numerical target for that individual face. You'll see for an instance, in the assignment for this week, in this course, that, I will challenge you to generate ten ideas and to turn those in. That kind of numerical target is very effective in encouraging participation from all members of your group. And lastly, some people. Point out that it's very hard in some organizations to actually get people to do their homework. That is, to actually do the assigned work of generating ten ideas working individually. If that's the case for you, then what I recommend is you go ahead and call a meeting which does succeed or is effective in getting people together, to have allocated some time. But then, after you've called the meeting and after you've got people together, you get them to work alone for the first thirty minutes, let's say of the allotted time. After which you can proceed to work together as a group.