True make it pop boffins will remember ‘ideating’ from our You should try this… series on Design Thinking. Now it’s time to talk about creative ideation.
Ideation can be the most fun, mad, and enlightening part of the process. After the needs of the user and the core problems have been defined, ideation is the phase in the middle where the magic happens: brainstorming, generating ideas, and just generally throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks.
Why is ideation important
The secret to ideation is quantity; quality comes later. The pride of ideation is someone who challenges convention and adopts the ‘no wrong answer’ mentality. The beauty of ideation is when one daft contribution has a domino effect and leads to a smattering of new ideas and one golden light bulb moment.
It’s important because it tempts you away from sticking to the obvious and coming up with a new, creative solution that maybe no one’s dug deep enough to discover. For best results, you’ve gotta be adaptable and work as a team for this one.
How to get better at creative ideation
1. Crave change and make mistakes. Great ideation comes from a genuine desire to make the world better by doing things differently, and you’re not going to do that by playing it safe. Being open and honest about your failures allows others to point out what they might have done differently, maybe something you hadn’t thought of, and collaborate.
2. Have two ideas that kinda work? Smush them together. The best ideators are people that make connections between ideas and can build on other people’s contributions.
3. Dream big but keep it human-shaped. While ideation thrives on pie in the sky thinking, what makes it part of design thinking is how it keeps the user at the centre of it all.
Using make it pop to ideate
Cramming a load of creatives into a room and saying, “GO!” might not be the best way to get their ideation juices flowing. As we mentioned above, ideation is a process within design thinking which needs an understanding of users and core problems to really work.
Practice makes perfect, and turning make it pop into a regular ideation session gets everyone into the habit of coming up with creative solutions to creative problems that are user-centred. Wanna read more about habit forming? Check out our post all about it!
