Working with colleagues from Sustainable Product Design, we took a look at some different activities that help generate ideas around the theme of "Travel to and from home".
Using several idea generation methods, we got from initial thoughts around the theme to a concept and a design that eventually became Superbus - the answer to ethical and sustainable travel (with a happy tree, horse, cat and leg battery included).
These methods of idea generation and lots more can be found by using IDEO method cards or the IDEO card app.
Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is probably a tool that we are all already familiar with. With the theme at the centre, lines are drawn to thoughts about that topic. A further extension would be grouping concepts together and tools like mindmeister allow us to collaborate on an online mind map in this way. In fact mindmeister is now integrated in to Google Docs as well as Drive. xmind offers an open source free alternative to mindmeister.
Affinity Mapping
This introduced the next level in the ideas generation process. Taking our mind map, we took our approaches to travel such as "magic", "leg battery", "rockets", "capture birds" and "evolve wings" and considered why we aren't already doing those things. In the case of magic, it is inconceivable that we aren't already deploying it to solve the energy crisis and the rising tension in the east. Nevertheless, Affinity Mapping asks that we write down these ideas on post-its and then look for related ideas and group them together. We identified that we had issues around "political and infrastructure", personal and social", "environmental" and "health and safety", the latter being a concern about the zipline/teleportation transport solution that we had offered up. Stormboard and mural.ly offer an online collaborative approach to the post-it note affinity mapping shown here.
Profiles, Visualstorming and Ideas Matrix
The third part of our process considered how we might effect solutions to our 4 idea groups in relation to various user profiles. By drawing thoughts as opposed to the traditional word orientated mind map, we were able to start conceiving what the solution might look like.
'Superbus' began to take shape, alongside a horse, a granny cloud and a happy tree. The solution became a community driven transport and education initiative that continually feeds back into itself. Wireless power generated by 'leg battery' offered an alternative power source and the whole thing was built out of recycled material supplied by the community. We had fixed Green Transport.
Finally an x,y scatter chart identified the positive environmental impact of our ideas in relation to the ease of implementation. The recycling and treasure hunting aspects were easy wins as they require little work to implement and recycling is already widely adopted.
This was a fantastic introduction to design process and idea generation. Combining these techniques and others that are identified by IDEO and in books like Universal Methods of Design, we can foster creative problem solving through activity based learning. These various methods allow different types of learner to connect with the process at different stages. Not only is this useful to the kinaesthetic learner, but mind mapping is a great activity for read-write learners and Visualstorming to the visual learner.