This week my team and I worked on the Ideation Phase of our Design Thinking project. We communicated through text, phone calls, and emails. We began this phase by rechecking and making our phase 2 project more concise and specific. Our revised focus question is: How might we provide all students access to online homework? This guiding question lead to the 100 Idea Challenge part of our project. In the part, each team member brainstormed 25 questions individually. We determined that no idea was too wild, the ideas needed to be generated rapidly, and we needed to keep the end user in mind. Once we brainstormed these ideas we documented them in a shared Google doc Cristal created, mainly because our other collaboration tool (Popplet) does not have spell check and it is nice to see them listed neatly in a list. I then created a shared Popplet where we each copy/pasted our 25 ideas. We sorted them into 4 categories: Long Shot, Rational, Inspiring, Most Likely to Please End User. Each bubble was put in the main category, however, if we felt an idea should be in more than one category we connected the bubble to the secondary category using the connection line feature in Popplet. This allowed us to see ideas that could be considered, for example, Inspiring and Most Likely to Delight the End User. This information would later help guide our second round of ideation. As we read over each other’s ideas, we made comments using the comment feature in Popplet.
Ideation was a really fun process to go through because you see yourself evolving in your own thinking and understanding of the concept. For example, some of my ideas were not very creative while others were on the opposite end of the spectrum. I think this is typical and a strength because sometimes the solution to a problem doesn’t need to be the most complex or most outlandish. Sometimes less is more. But, sometimes wild ideas will solve the problem in a way that will be more effective for the end user. Weighing all options and always keeping the end user in mind will help us come to a consensus once we’ve completed the entire DT process. For now, it is excellent to have ideas all over the board!
The next part of this step was to sort out some favorites from the ideas we sorted out. Do do this I looked at the connection lines we made between idea bubble and the category bubbles. I looked for ones that were inspiring and were most likely to delight the end user. Each team member did this as well. I then created a template in the same popplet to house these favorites. We then were able to brainstorm some of the constraints and possible solutions to these constraints in this new Popplet grouping. From here we narrowed down the favorites even more to just a few promising ideas that we will continue to examine in the next phase of our DT project.
Ideation was a really fun process to go through because you see yourself evolving in your own thinking and understanding of the concept. For example, some of my ideas were not very creative while others were on the opposite end of the spectrum. I think this is typical and a strength because sometimes the solution to a problem doesn’t need to be the most complex or most outlandish. Sometimes less is more. But, sometimes wild ideas will solve the problem in a way that will be more effective for the end user. Weighing all options and always keeping the end user in mind will help us come to a consensus once we’ve completed the entire DT process. For now, it is excellent to have ideas all over the board!
The next part of this step was to sort out some favorites from the ideas we sorted out. Do do this I looked at the connection lines we made between idea bubble and the category bubbles. I looked for ones that were inspiring and were most likely to delight the end user. Each team member did this as well. I then created a template in the same popplet to house these favorites. We then were able to brainstorm some of the constraints and possible solutions to these constraints in this new Popplet grouping. From here we narrowed down the favorites even more to just a few promising ideas that we will continue to examine in the next phase of our DT project.
This week’s biggest challenge was finding a time when we could all collaborate together live. We mainly communicated through email and texts this week. I think that if I were organizing this project for my students and I knew they would need to work on it outside of the school day I would do a pre-grouping survey to help determine schedules so I could try to match group members up with others who have similar availability. For example, I work on almost all my course work between 8pm and 2am and occasionally I squeeze in some time while my baby is napping. I think for this process to be really efficient a dedicated collaboration time should be established by the group. My group has been working very diligently to stay upto date with emails and text though, so we are making it work. The Web 2.0 tools we are using also make this process efficient and more collaborative than I think could have been possible just a few years ago.
The ideation phase while a key component of design thinking, I think could also be put to good use in other ways with a classroom or staff. With staff it might be a way to collaborate to solve a parking/traffic flow issue on campus for pick-up and drop-off of students. Students could use it to solve a social problem on campus such as kids not having a buddy to play with at recess. This is an essential part of DT, but I think it is a wonderful solution generating strategy that can be implemented on it’s own too. It taps into different creative and critical thinking skills. Keeping an open mind during this phase is really important to the creative process. As, Tim Brown asserts in his TED Talk, adults are hesitant to be creative because they are worried about being judged by others. The success of the ideation phase depends on the team being able to implement the other three C’s (Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking) effectively so that the fourth C (Creativity) can take root and flourish.
Resource:
Brown,T. [Ted]. (2008) Tales of creativity and play. [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwUn-aA0VY on July 20, 2015.
The ideation phase while a key component of design thinking, I think could also be put to good use in other ways with a classroom or staff. With staff it might be a way to collaborate to solve a parking/traffic flow issue on campus for pick-up and drop-off of students. Students could use it to solve a social problem on campus such as kids not having a buddy to play with at recess. This is an essential part of DT, but I think it is a wonderful solution generating strategy that can be implemented on it’s own too. It taps into different creative and critical thinking skills. Keeping an open mind during this phase is really important to the creative process. As, Tim Brown asserts in his TED Talk, adults are hesitant to be creative because they are worried about being judged by others. The success of the ideation phase depends on the team being able to implement the other three C’s (Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking) effectively so that the fourth C (Creativity) can take root and flourish.
Resource:
Brown,T. [Ted]. (2008) Tales of creativity and play. [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwUn-aA0VY on July 20, 2015.