IDEO – Tools for Social Innovators

Most people love jumping ahead to the brainstorming phase. It’s fun, liberating, and can take minimal effort, especially if you’re doing it on your own. But if you’re doing it right, it shouldn’t be the first step… it’s the middle step in the design thinking process, called “Ideation.” It takes what you’ve learned from investigating the problem you’re addressing and uses that information to come up with potential solutions.

Brainstorming works best if you’re not just doing it by yourself in a vacuum. Diverse perspectives can help you take brainstorming to a whole new level. Deferring judgment and criticism of ideas is essential for building on one another’s ideas and coming up with solutions that you likely would not have generated on your own.

Here are best practices for brainstorming like a professional from IDEO:

Continue reading Brainstorm like a Pro

Time to level up, gang.

In this post introducing design thinking and Human-Centered Design, we dove right into the first stage of Empathize. We talked about how to better understand the problems, needs, and opportunities of your intended beneficiaries with methods like those in IDEO’s DesignKit and by utilizing the Value Proposition Canvas.

Once you’ve immersed yourself in the experiences of your target market, you’ll probably have a lot of data. What do you do next?

Time to turn that raw data into information you can use to add value to those people’s lives.

In the Define stage of design thinking, you synthesize the observations about your users. Here are some great tools and strategies for synthesizing what you learned, as well as a video from IDEO on the process of framing your design challenge based on this information:

Defining your problem statement/design challenge is one of the most important steps of the entire design thinking process. It will guide your ideation process (stage 3) and will have major implications for the solutions you generate. Continue reading How to Frame Your Design Challenge