Why Idea Generation?
“OMG! That was an obvious idea! It could have come to my mind readily! But it didn’t, why?”
How many times have experienced that surprising situation in your life? So many times, right? Maybe in different scales and context, but we all have perceived those moments of surprises in our lives. These experiences occur when we encounter a new and brilliant idea that seems to be simply achievable. Research indicates that a new idea mostly, comes from pre-existing ideas; Ideas are right in front of us. We just need to explore a new connection between them, combine them together, and generate new ones (Greiner, 2017). We need to know what we want and then look around. We need to observe, listen, touch, taste, and smell actively, knowing all we need is somewhere around us.
However, sometimes, we try, but we don’t come up with any ideas. The reason is that we overthink, filter, pre-judge, criticize, or evaluate the first-coming ideas at the very first stage of thinking. That disappoints and stops us from further exploration, and leaves us with no hope to go on. If you are struggling with those hard moments, this module is for you. Whether you are an instructor or a learner, the presented strategies and techniques in this chapter are designed to change your mindset of problem solving and creating new ideas. Through learning and practicing three brainstorming techniques, you will be able to create new ideas by reconsidering pre-existed ideas and exploring new meaningful connection between them. By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Identify the importance of idea generation in design thinking process.
- Define the term ‘brainstorming’.
- Identify some challenges and concerns associated with group brainstorming.
- Use the three techniques- rapid ideation, reverse storming, and observational storming to generate numerous ideas in a short amount of time.
- Overcome fears in making mistakes, and accomplish courage in idea generation.
