In todays class we learnt about what methods and techniques we can use to enhance our ideation, and come up with ideas for a project. “The more things you are interested in, the better your work will be”. This quote by Michael Bierut shows that if we are able to understand and be interested in a broad range of areas, means that we can understand and design better for that area and their target users. This is important when it comes to ideation, as we should have knowledge on a wide range of things. This is especially true when it comes to problems in the world, as those are the areas that we should be working towards.
The first one that we done was one to loosen us up and was quite funny. We were asked to think of the worst ways to increase concentration levels in the classroom. This was to relieve anxiety thinking that our ideas aren’t good enough, and flips the concept on its head. Removing the criticism can help us be more confident in our ideation. Two ideas that I came up with to increase concentration in the worst way was to hand out complementary RedBulls, and to have the teacher stare at only you while they are teaching. This was quite a funny exercise and helped loosen us up before we thought of other ways to ideate.
When ideating, it is important to think about a problem that we want to solve. This is important as it means that our idea will actually be useful if it is filling in a gap or solving a problem that people are struggling with. When ideating for a large organisation or area, we should try to narrow it down and pick an area that we are interested in, and see what we can do there, instead of trying to design for everything. When it comes to world problems, we can’t expect to be able to solve a massive problem, such as homelessness, but what we can do is something small that has a big impact.
We then created a mind map, putting down everything we thought of when it came to education. Doing this collaboratively meant that we could get a broad range of thoughts in a short period of time. Doing this meant that we could then pick an area and think more in depth as to what problems are in that area, and what we can do to try and solve that problem. This exercise was very interesting as within a few minutes we could see some routes that we could potentially go down for further development.
We then looked at another method called connections, and this is where we look at different aspects of UX design and use it as a guideline for ideation. These different connections give us a guide to work through, and they are:
These connections help ensure that we are ideating something that is actually useful, and not just something that we think would be cool. There are objective problems in the world that do need solved, so we should be working in that direction as UX designers, as this is the right thing to do. From these 4 different connections, there can be thousands of ideas that we can find.
Some other methods of ideation are: