One of the best ways to explore creativity is through building. Simple low fidelity prototypes can allow us to transform simple (and at times complex) ideas into something physical. In doing so we inevitably open a space for continuing to explore, reevaluate and iterate.
A Morphological chart is a method that splits a product/solution into smaller chunks that can then be analyzed and ideated for independently. Afterwards those ideas can be mixed and matched to develop different solutions.
To be used after having a clear overview of the design problem and at the beginning of the ideation phase.
When people must tackle a common complex challenge, you can release their inherent creativity and leadership as well as their capacity to self-organize.
Open Space makes it possible to include everybody in constructing agendas and addressing issues that are important to them. Having co-created the agenda and free to follow their passion, people will take responsibility very quickly for solving problems and moving into action. Letting go of central control (i.e., the agenda and assignments) and putting it in the hands of all the participants generates commitment, action, innovation, and follow-through. You can use Open Space with groups as large as a couple of thousand people!
A brainstorming and prioritizing method that places emphasis on the most important ideas and actions.
Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. In a first step, participants brainstorm around different areas, such as technologies, human needs, and existing services. In a second step, they rapidly combine elements from those areas to create new, fun and innovative concepts. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.
A lateral thinking approach for ideas to a difficult problem
With this facilitation technique you can immediately include everyone regardless of how large the group is. You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance.
Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified. No buy-in strategies needed! Simple and elegant!
Help a group to time-travel and tap their imagination by fictional objects.
With tangible objects and the stories your participants make up w/ them you'll get so much richer inputs and context to inform joint visioning / strategizing:
The future doesn't look that far away when you can pick it off the shelf.
At IDEO.org we have seven little rules that unlock the creative power of a brainstorming session.
This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group.
This brainstorming method uses our senses to generate ideas.
DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.
DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.