Category Archives: Creative Thinking Tools

Sketchbook/Notebook methodology

Sketch­books and note­books are one and the same when you are an artist. Sketch­es are notes and notes illus­tra­tions of moments of inspi­ra­tion and enquiry.  The most impor­tant part of any sys­tem is to stay out of the way of cre­ativ­i­ty and spark that lights our fire. Pages of draw­ings can be free con­ven­tions unless […]

Conceptualize

Explode—Divergent think­ing Take risks, be per­sis­tent, be curi­ous. Fail ear­ly and fail often. Using the inspi­ra­tions that were col­lect­ed in phase one, the team offer up ideas that address the needs of the brief. Team mem­bers can offer up fresh con­cepts or build on the work of oth­ers. Go for quan­ti­ty, explore each idea entire­ly. […]

Some Design Principals

Com­plex prob­lems require sim­ple, clear and hon­est solu­tions. Suc­cess­ful solu­tions will move peo­ple by sat­is­fy­ing their needs, giv­ing mean­ing to their lives and rais­ing their hopes and expec­ta­tions. Excep­tion­al prob­lems demand excep­tion­al solu­tions that may be rad­i­cal and even dis­rup­tive. Effec­tive solu­tions will be col­lab­o­ra­tive, inclu­sive and devel­oped with the peo­ple who use them. No […]

Creative Confrontation Methods

Are sim­i­lar in nature to asso­ci­a­tion meth­ods where com­plete­ly new unex­pect­ed ideas are gen­er­at­ed. How­ev­er this method Enforces new ideas to fit the pro­file of the prob­lem. There are many tech­niques that can be adopt­ed with­in this method. Lat­er­al think­ing Analo­gies and chance The 3 com­po­nent mod­el for cre­ativ­i­ty applies to all meth­ods.

Team dynamics: Swapping individuals

Through­out the process learn­ing facil­i­ta­tors should be try­ing to cre­ate even teams. By even we mean func­tion­al­ly rather than struc­tural­ly, acknowl­edg­ing that indi­vid­u­als per­form dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Good com­bi­na­tions are vibrant and pro­duc­tive. Spot­ting poor com­bi­na­tions is rel­a­tive­ly easy, as the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the team will be great­ly reduced. Par­tic­i­pants should be moved, as […]

Team rotation methods

Let­ters are peo­ple in teams, #num­bers are projects and cir­cles are tables/work areas Three Stage Q&A Rota­tion In this mod­el teams rotate around projects in a two-step process illus­trat­ed in the dia­gram above. As the teams come to a nat­ur­al ebb and the facil­i­ta­tors feel it is time to reen­er­gize the group, each team (fig. […]

Team rotation across projects

A key com­po­nent of facil­i­tat­ing team based cre­ative think­ing process­es, is the require­ment that teams repeat­ed­ly move around projects. There are a num­ber of impor­tant rea­sons for this dynam­ic: Ideation—Going for Vol­ume More peo­ple, means more ideas. Mas­ter­ing a process requires rep­e­ti­tion; by mov­ing the teams to a new project while still in the same […]

Capturing and evaluation of creative sessions

Facil­i­ta­tion of the cre­ative process runs in two very dis­tinct streams. One expe­ri­enced by the Facilitation/Management team and the oth­er expe­ri­ence is that of the cre­ative par­tic­i­pants. It is impor­tant that the cre­ative par­tic­i­pant stream is com­plete­ly insu­lat­ed from the bumps and glitch­es with­in the Facilitator/Management stream and that they expe­ri­ence a clean­ly run machine […]