5 Techniques to Conduct a Successful

Ideation Process
The Workshop

Conducting successful Ideation workshops

When conducting Ideation sessions, have you come across

situations where some people will be more forward to speak while
others would not be? What about if someone makes a snarky
comment on someone’s idea? Everyone is entitled to their own
opinion but to conduct a successful Ideation process, we should
stick to some guidelines and specific processes.
I deation is the third stage in the Design Thinking Process. It is one

of the most important stages that you follow as a designer. This is

the stage where you come up with ideas and solutions for the design
problem that you have been given. You generate many ideas and
solutions with the user of Sketching and Prototyping. I’m sure even
you would agree when I say that Ideation is the most exciting stage
in a Design Thinking project.

Through an Ideation process, you will be able to step out of your box
to explore the various situations and ideas that you haven’t
considered before. Furthermore, the various techniques of ideations
will help to focus on your user’s needs and the important
functionalities that you must consider. But aside from these benefits,
the most important beneficial fact would be that it builds team spirit
and strength between all your team members.

To conduct a successful Ideation process, you should use several

techniques to get the most innovative ideas out of an individual.
There are various techniques which you can use to get brilliant ideas.
Each of this technique has its own perks,

 Brainstorming (includes Braindumping, Brainwriting,

Brainwalking)

 SCAMPER

 Worst possible idea

 Challenge assumptions
 Analogies

Source: Introduction to the Essential Ideation Techniques which

are the Heart of Design Thinking by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu
Siang

Let’s look into each of these techniques separately to understand

them more,

1. Brainstorming

This is the most common technique that is used within the Ideation
process. During a Brainstorm session, you always leverage the other
team member’s ideas and build upon them. For this session to be
conducted, you must build an environment where a person will be
comfortable speaking without any criticism. To conduct a successful
Brainstorm session, it is best to switch between group and individual
Brainstorm sessions.
Brainstorming Session (Image Source: DrawKit Illustrations)

Brainstorming which is a group session has 3 siblings known as

1. Braindumping (Individual sessions)

2. Brainwriting (Mix of individual and group sessions)

3. Brainwalking (Mix of individual and group sessions)

Not every person will be comfortable participating in these sessions.

Introverts would be more tempted to sit in the back of the room and
reflect on these ideas on their own whereas Extroverts would be
more dominant and controlling of the session. To avoid such
situations, the sibling techniques of Brainstorming can be put into
use,
 Braindumping
This method is very similar to Brainstorm but it is conducted
individually. This session is conducted where members of the
design team would write their ideas on post-it notes and later
share them within the team itself.

 Brainwriting
This method too is like a Brainstorm session but in this session,
the individual will write their idea on a piece of paper and pass it
onto another participant who will elaborate on the first person’s
idea. This process is continued within the entire team and
afterward, all the papers will be collected for an instant
discussion to see which idea would be the best.

 Brainwalking
Brainwalk is like Brainwriting but instead of passing around the
paper, the participants would walk around the room to find
‘ideation stations’ where they could discuss and elaborate on the
other individuals’ ideas.

Each of these techniques under Brainstorming has its own perks.

Therefore, it is best to conduct braindumping, brainwriting, and
brainwalking before and after a brainstorming group session. This
brainstorming group session is mostly like a discussion among you
and your peers therefore it is best to have it right in the middle of the
entire session.

Source: Learn How to Use the Best Ideation Methods:

Brainstorming, Braindumping, Brainwriting, and
Brainwalking by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang

2. SCAMPER
This lateral thinking technique refers to a set of actions that can be
carried out to help with the innovation process. There are 7
inspirational elements in this technique,

1. Substitute

2. Combine

3. Adapt

4. Modify/ Magnify/ Minify

5. Put to another use

6. Eliminate

7. Reverse

You can use SCAMPER on an existing product or service to improve

it. What you can do is to ask questions with regards to the 7
elements to help generate new ideas within each of these areas. By
going through these elements, you can ask 7 different types of
questions that will help innovate and improve the existing product
or service.
SCAMPER (Image Source: DrawKit Illustrations)

Source: SCAMPER: Improving Products and Services by Mind

Tools, Learn How to Use the Best Ideation Methods: SCAMPER by
Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang

3. Worst Possible Idea

This technique is known to be highly effective to get the person’s

creativity out into the open. This is an efficient technique to create a
comfortable environment for any participant who would be doubtful
to speak up.

This technique is conducted by coming up with the worst possible

idea or solution for the design problem that you currently have. By
coming up with the worst possible idea you will reduce the pressure
among participants to come up with a great idea.

As you can realize, by coming up with wrong and impossible ideas,

no one would judge you. Well, how can anyone judge you when the
idea is wrong anyway! Due to this, it takes the pressure and anxiety
off a person and improves their self-confidence to speak up.

This technique is not exactly an icebreaker-style technique but it

does help with it up to some extent.

For example, if you are given to come up with the worst

possible idea for a new idea for a design of a sneaker. Worst
possible ideas can be,

 Sneakers that play music when you walk

 A sneaker that will light up when you walk.

 A sneaker that has mirrors for you to bend to see your face
from it.

Well, you see what weird ideas these are right? Try to come up
with a set of worst possible ideas to get your creative juices
flowing!
Worst Possible Idea (Image Source: DrawKit Illustrations)

Source: Learn How to Use the Best Ideation Methods: Worst

Possible Idea by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang

4. Challenge Assumptions

This is like a reboot session for the design problem that you have. To
carry out this technique, take a step back from your problem and ask
direct questions about all the assumptions that you have about the
problem. This will be very effective when you are stuck or when
you’ve run out of solutions.

Challenge assumptions are useful to think twice about the

characteristics and functionalities of a product or service that you
are looking out for a solution for. The questions you ask can be quite
silly but they will really make you and your team think about it from
a whole different perspective and come up with an even greater
solution!

These questions can be obvious questions like;

Do doors always have to have handles?

Do phones really need to have a cable?
Do cars need to have a steering wheel?

As you can see, these questions will really look silly at first, but when
you think about it in a new aspect like so, you can come with great
new ideas which would be even better.

“You have to ask a few dumb questions before you reach

the insightful ones” — Don Norman
Challenge Assumptions (Image Source: DrawKit Illustrations)

This technique can be done with the use of 3 simple steps,

1. List assumptions

2. Challenge assumptions

3. Find ways of making the challenge a reality

Assumptions are something that would seem like an impossible

thing to do or something a person would believe to do a certain
thing. After you make a list of all these assumptions, you can
challenge them by asking “How could this be not true?” or “What if
we could do this halfway?”. After you make a list of such questions,
you must think about how to make it a reality. By asking these silly
questions, you will be able to come up with more innovative ideas
with out-of-box thinking.

Source: What are Challenge Assumptions? by Lucid Chart Team

5. Analogies

In reality, Analogies are used to explain complex realities to young

children by their parents. Things may be different in the design
world; the concept is pretty much the same. You use analogies to,

 Build empathy with users

 Define information

 Generate new and innovative ideas

 Gain a fresh look

As we are talking about effective Ideation techniques, let’s focus only

on ‘Generating new and innovative ideas with the user of analogies’
area.
Analogies (Image Source: DrawKit Illustrations)

The concept of Analogies is used to explore unrelated concepts to

gain new insights into your design problems. These insights may
help you to reshape a known concept into a whole different one
within a different context. Purposely looking into analogies gets the
design team thinking on a different level which will help to find new
inspiration and new ideas on a specific concept. Analogies can help
the team to seek inspiration on problem-solving as well as redesign
the design problem to come up with uncommon design solutions.

Using analogies will give you a fresh aspect to look at your design
problems. There are 6 simple steps to come up with analogies,

1. Extract attributes of your problem scenario

2. Look for similar objects and their behaviors

3. Look towards an industry completely different from yours

4. Look for specific people that you could interview

5. Use Brainstorming methods

6. Create an analogous inspiration board

First, check if you can make connections within the scenarios of the
problem where these attributes exist. Afterward, check for similar
objects that provide an innovative use of resources. To create better
analogies by learning through a completely different industry. You
can conduct interviews or observations to get more information
needed to create your analogy and then to come up with the
analogies you can conduct brainstorming sessions with your team
members. After you have a definite set of analogies you can create an
analogous board with photos, quotes, and scenarios to help with
inspiration and insights for better design solutions.

Source: Learn How to Use the Best Ideation Methods:

Analogies by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang

Conclusion

These different ideation techniques can be used to conduct

successful ideation sessions. There are much more techniques than
these but these 5 are found to be the most effective out of everything.
But for different projects, you might found out different ideation
techniques more suitable.