Some of our favorite ideas
“The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.” — Linus Pauling
Over the past two weeks we have had the good fortune of working with Brian Rink of IDEO San Fransisco who is facilitating our current class on Service Design. But the past two days were especially fortunate, as we learned to do brainstorming IDEO style. They call them brainstormers and they take them pretty seriously. Here are some rules that Brian shared with us:
- Defer judgment
- Encourage wild ideas
- Build on the ideas of others
- Stay focused on the topic
- One conversation at a time
- Be visual
- Go for quantity
Besides a helpful set of rules, each brainstorming sessions needs a focused, informed question (not too broad not too narrow) and a good facilitator. Brian’s tips for facilitating included:
- Ensure ideas are captured and everyone behaves.
- At this point, we are focusing on IDEA GENERATION, not evaluation. That comes later. Keep the group generative.
- Make sure everyone gets heard and that everyone is listening, Groups are more powerful because they BUILD on each other’s ideas.
- Encourage WILD ideas, it’s fun and can trigger great innovations.
- Try to keep ideas to a SOUND BYTE or a headline, Encourage catchy titles and drawings.
- Have fun!
Brainstorming sign up sheet
For this class we have 7 groups of students working across two different topics (libraries and telemedicine), but for the brainstorming days everyone got to help everyone else. I think this is what made the past two days so productive, we had a chance to forget about our own projects and try to come up with ideas for our classmates. This, and the fact that each session was limited to one hour, helped maintain a good level of energy of focus through out each day.
Sketching an idea
Each hour long session included about six students and are goal was to come up with 100 ideas. After the end of two days, my group had literally hundreds of ideas to move forward with. Of course many of them were matching, or unrealistic or just plain silly, but I am expecting to find a few gems of inspiration.
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