In this lesson you're gonna learn how to come up with consistently great ideas. And you're gonna be able to use this ideas to create those meaningful and accessible experiences. Let's get started with a little exercise. Here's what I want you to do, take a piece of paper, draw a couple of circles on it. Now, try and come up with as many objects that use the circle as possible. So for example, you might draw a clock in one circle or a ball in the other. Go ahead. Okay, how did that exercise go? What were some of the challenges that you faced in that exercise? Common challenges I hear are, some people say, I just judge my ideas before I even wrote them down. I only got down two ideas, because I had 20, but I didn't think they were good enough. So judgement is something that often prevents us from coming up with a lot of ideas. A second concern I often hear is about fixation. That means you get caught on one topic. So did anybody just start to think of lots of different ideas for balls? For example, a baseball, a softball, a football. Yeah, you can get stuck on one concept in one category, which limits you from coming up with other categories. So two common pitfalls in ideation are, judgement and fixation. Now that we know something about the common pitfalls, how do you consistently generate ideas? Well, there are few rules for consistently generating great ideas. Let's start with the first one. May sound obvious, but stay focused. A great way to stay focused is to write the opportunity statement at the top of a whiteboard. Here's an example. This was a project that we are working on. We're trying to develop software for kids to learn fractions. As a reminder of what we wanted to generate ideas about, we wrote at the top of the board, kids need a way to learn fractions that relates to their everyday life. Every time we got off track, we just looked back up to the top of the board to remind us what we were focused on. The second rule of ideation is to be obvious. What's obvious to you is not obvious to other people. Consider this team with whom I've worked. Each person on this team brings in a different perspective to the ideation session. What's obvious to me, is not obvious to my colleague, Dan, in the middle. He has an entirely different set of life experiences that he brings so, remember, be obvious. The third is generate many ideas. Go for quantity. Many raw ideas are necessary for innovation. The typical number of ideas that are generated are in the 100's to 1,000's for one single idea at the end. The fourth rule of ideation is to build on ideas. This means going with the flow. Let me give you an example from a project which we are working on, a hand held blood pressure measurement device. Nurses were to go in and work with the patient to get their blood pressure. We're brainstorming ways to get this device more meaningful and useful to the patient. Often times, the nurse would just read the blood pressure, say a number and it wouldn't mean anything to the patient. So we started brainstorming ways to make it better and we started building on each other's ideas. Well what if the results, once recorded into the handheld device, were sent to the medical team. Somebody liked that idea, said what if we also sent it to the primary care doctor. Well, if we're sending it out already, why not send it to the patient? Why not send it to the patient's caregivers and their family? That was an example of building on each others' ideas. And lastly, number five, have fun. Research has shown that if we're in a good mood, and we're having a good time, we're more likely to be able to generate diverse ideas. Now that you know the rules for ideation, let's talk about specific ideation techniques. I'm going to go over five of them. In truth there's hundreds, but these are the five that I find are most effective. The first practice is to list ideas. So write out every single idea you have. Perhaps on a post-it note or on a whiteboard, and post it up immediately. Here's an example of that team I was describing. We're listing ideas, any ideas that come to us. The second technique is to eliminate a constraint. This comes from a project on which we were working. We were trying to make the airplane travel experience less stressful for families who travel with young children. How might we do this? We had brainstormed, by making a list of some pretty obvious ideas to us. And we were hitting a bit of a wall. So we thought, what if we eliminate a constraint? The constraint we decided to eliminate was gravity. What if we didn't have gravity? By eliminating this very fundamental constraint of airplane travel, we came up with a whole new set of ideas. Now, most of them were impractical, but we did reach our goal of coming up with a high quantity of ideas. And by releasing that constraint, we began to see the problem in a new light. It was this release of constraint that ultimately led to the solution. So the third technique is to make an analogy. When I was trying to develop a measuring device for a fuel tank to understand how much fuel was in that tank, I started thinking what are other ways that we can measure depth? In a body of liquid. So I started thinking about boats. And how is it that fishermen look down and measure the depth in a lake or in a pond? And there's some that will use a piece of string with a weight on it, and attach it, and drop it down, and then pull the string up, and measure and see how deep it went. By using this analogy, I could break out of the constraints I was having with the fuel tank and think in a different domain about how other people might solve this problem. The fourth technique is probably my favorite one. It's exaggeration. I was working with a software company and we were trying to redesign their billing software. Not a lot of people enjoy using billing software, so we decide to exaggerate. And said what if using billing software was as exciting as a boy's fourth birthday party? Look at the picture of this boy right here, he looks pretty exciting. What if using software was that exciting? By changing the situation and exaggerating the emotional response that one would have to this experience. We came up with a whole new set of ideas. The fifth technique for generating a lot of great ideas is a technique I like to call, get in the garbage. This is basically about generating the worst idea. The ideas you want to throw away. Now why would you have an idea session of bad ideas. By generating bad ideas we often relinquish any pressure we have to come up with good ideas. And often in every bad idea, there's a kernel of something wonderful. I encourage you to try this one out. Now that we've covered techniques for generating ideas, I wanna explain three different ways to generate ideas, or configurations of people that you might work with. The first is individual, the second is team, and the third is community. Let me explain why you might choose to use any one at any one time. The first configuration is called individual ideation. You might start with this technique at first. In fact, research has shown that the best ideas often come when people start alone, and then move into groups of people. You start with this so you can get all your ideas out, without being biased by anything that anybody else says. This can just mean you taking a moment alone with your notebook and writing down all your ideas. A second reason you wanna start with individual ideation Is because you wanna be able to get in the flow. If you're in a group of people generating ideas, every time somebody else is talking, if you come up with an idea, you might not have an opportunity to share it. Whereas when you're doing it alone, the ideas can just flow out of you, and there's no interruptions at anytime. After you've generated ideas individually, now it's time to get into a team. Team ideation is great for when you need new perspectives. You've generated ideas alone now, and now it's time to get ideas from other people who have different points of view than you. A second reason you wanna do ideation in a team, is it's a great team energizer. When people are feeling like you're not quite sure where the project is going, what direction you wanna go, getting everybody together for a short, perhaps 30 minute brainstorm about new ideas, is a great way of getting people focused and excited about the topic again. And third and related is about making progress. Sometimes when you're alone and working on an idea, your feeling kind of stuck. Typically when you get together with a big group of people, they have new ideas, they show you a way to work in a way you hadn't been thinking, and you feel like you're making more progress. And lastly, after you've generated ideas alone, and then in a team, you wanna go out to the community, and generate ideas directly with the community. This is a picture of a team that was working with some medical professionals. And they wanted to go out and actually work with the doctors and the nurses to generate ideas for enhancing a patient device that they were using, that you wear on your body, to understand were some of their solutions practical? Were they interesting? And what kind of things were they not thinking about? Their hypothesis was that the doctors and nurses had a lot of great ideas and they wanted to take advantage of all their local expertise and their years of experience working in the hospitals. A second reason that you want to generate ideas with the community, is that you often can get by and through the ideation process. So if you're developing an idea, and it's critical that the people for whom the design is for, adopt the idea, getting them involved in the creation process really helps them to adopt the idea later. Sometimes, you can't always reach the community members face to face. So don't be afraid to go online. Many communities now have online blogs and group places where you can find and talk with different people. Here's a team that was trying to generate ideas with social workers. They didn't necessarily have face to face access to them, but they were able to find a great big group of people to work with online, and generate and get that expertise that they really needed. So, I told you to get a lot of ideas, right? Now you have a bunch, but what do you do with all of them? And how do you choose with ones to go forward with? You can't build a hundred different ideas. So here are five criteria I find very helpful for selecting ideas. First, out of all the ideas you generated, which ones are the most useful? Second, which one are the most desirable? Do you think people would really like them? Do you like them? Third, what do you think is the easiest to use? It may not be the technically most sophisticated, but you think everybody would be able to figure out how to use that solution. The fourth criteria is, what are the most functional ideas? I told you to come up with some pretty wild and crazy ideas. No everyone is going to be functional. So pick one that is going to be highly functional and you know you could make tomorrow. And the last one is, what's the most sustainable? Now you can think about sustainable in two ways. The first way is, what's good for the environment? What's good for the planet? And the second way is to think who would pay money for it? Is this something that I can actually make that people would use and buy. And the last key point to all of these is ideas take time to grow. I show you this picture of a fern, and I show it to you, because it's just at the beginning of it's life. Think about ideas like seeds you might plant in a garden. You don't dig them up everyday to see how they're doing, you give them time to mature, and to grow into beautiful plants. Think about your ideas in that way. In this lesson, you've learned common constraints for coming up with good ideas. You've learned techniques for coming up with great ideas. And you've also learned different configurations of people that you might use to come up with great ideas.
