The next step in the design thinking process is my personal favorite, ideate. Coming up with as many ideas or solutions to a problem as you possibly can. So let's talk about the different ways we approach ideation in the design thinking method.
One, we want quantity. Two, we want a diversity of ideas or solutions, and it's all about generation, generating quantity and diversity. So we want to keep in mind in this process that it's quantity, not quality, that we're going for at first.
We can determine quality later. Getting as many ideas out at the beginning is the critical part. And for.
For that we have to suspend judgment, and suspending judgment not only of our own ideas, but of other people's ideas. Just get them out on the table. In this process you want to make sure that all the people that are collaborating and working in this process have a voice at the table. There are generally introverts in the room and what you want to do is you want to come up with workshops or exercises within this process that helps them get their ideas and their voice on the table when they might not normally speak and there's lots of great ways to do that.
So you want to make sure that everybody is heard because everybody has ideas. Now here's the critical point. The toughest point is that we want to focus on novelty over relevance in the ideation process. Now you're probably thinking, well, if it's not relevant, what good will it do? From my experience in decades in the design industry, relevance is something that people do really, really well.
You know, the relevant spreadsheet, the relevant, you know, brochure, the relevant response to something. That's something that we operate out of constantly. It's the novelty that is difficult for most of us. And getting novel thinking, novel ideas out.
is the most important part. If we have novel ideas, and I always use the analogy of some of the products that Apple has created, who knew we needed the iPod, right? Who knew we needed the iPhone? Those were novel solutions, but we're also relevant.
And there's the sweet spot. I could do a whole talk just on novelty and relevance, but there is the sweet spot between novelty and relevance, and that's where we innovate. This we do really, really well. So in the ideation phase, we need to focus on novelty.
Some of the ways, some of the methods and processes that we use in the ideation phase are mind maps, sketches, skits, storyboards, game storming. This is really great and there's some great books out on this. Charettes, where we actually bring in the users of our products to ideate with us. So this is just a few of the possible methods that we can use in this step of the process. But in a nutshell, this is ideation.
And you always want to shoot for novelty first. No judgment, just novelty.