Natasha Ehlen | Just About It

Attending a gathering for female web Art Directors last week, I discovered a great interest in ways and methods of boosting the creative process. I shared some of my experiences from Hyper Island, and that led me to thinking over everything I had learned about creativity in the past months. So I decided to summarize my insights in this blog post and share them with all of you. Here are some methods which, from my experience, can be enormously useful while working on ideas in group.

Generally, idea generation can be described as an interchange of two phases – the one when you “open up”, allowing and welcoming all ideas, and the one when you narrow down your ideas and select the most viable ones. This process can be repeated a number of times until a satisfiable result is achieved.

About focus questions
A key to having an efficient brainstorming is formulating the focus questions right. Read the brief thoroughly, make a de-brief, and identify core problems. Then, phrase the focus questions trying to be quite specific with what you want to find out.

Here are some examples of focus questions:
How might we get people to socialize more using their mobile phones?
How might we get young people to exercise more?
How might we create a party that everyone will remember?

Organizing a brainstorming session
To create an effective brainstorming session, the tempo of idea generation should be kept pretty high. Set a time limit – 10-15 minutes for each focus question – to make sure that people don’t run out of energy and inspiration. Put on some music, get enough post-its and pens for everyone and go ahead with generating ideas!

Consider appointing a person responsible for keeping time and putting down the ideas. It’s a good way of making sure every idea is heard and understood by everyone in the room.

Rules of brainstorming (shared by IDEO at their workshop at Hyper Island)
1. Defer judgement
no ideas are bad or inappropriate at this stage

2. Encourage wild ideas
the wilder you go, the more you move away yourself from the most obvious ideas

3. Build on others’ ideas
add something of your own and take an idea further

4. Stay focused on topic
don’t stray from the core of the discussion

5. Be visual
make small drawings when you put down your ideas – they’ll give you a mind-map of the session and trigger other’s creativity

6. One conversation at a time
this rule allows all ideas to be heard and built upon

7. Go for quantity, not quality
make sure all the ideas are brought to the table at this stage

Creating idea clusters
Now, it’s time to bring some order into the chaos. Using post-its makes arranging ideas into groups quick and easy. Usually you’ll see that some of the ideas are related. Clustering them together will give you a more structured picture of the results of your brainstorming.

Evaluating ideas
At this stage you use your critical eye to evaluate ideas. Bring in your research insights to determine if the idea is suitable to the client’s needs. It can be useful to set up criteria for evaluating ideas, such as degree of innovation, suitability to the target group, etc.

Having undergone this process, you’ll hopefully end up with a couple of ideas that are worth proceeding with.

Idea development
Idea development is can be carried out in the same way as I described above, i.e. first opening up and then narrowing down (evaluating). At this stage your focus questions will be more specific. To develop an idea further it can be useful to approach it from different angles, having a couple of focus questions for each of them.

Visualize early
When a concept starts taking shape, take your time to visualize it. This will make the idea more tangible and understandable to everyone on the group. Visualizing a concept will also force you to explore it further and test its viability. In this process, you might discover that you were on the wrong track and the idea simply doesn’t work. Well, hopefully, you’ll have other ideas in stock to go on with. Otherwise, take a break, get some post-its and start to brainstorm again.

Enjoy it!
Creating a relaxed and friendly atmosphere will benefit your creative process. Focus on the task, but don’t forget to have fun! If you become drained of energy, there are some really good energy boosters that are easy to find on the web – group exercises that make sound and look silly, but do the job perfectly well.

What are your experiences of the creative process? Do you think it’s better off structured or chaotic? Looking forward to hearing your opinions!

As a class promotion project, our class at Hyper Island came up with the idea of creating our own nation in the cloud, hence the name – Cloudania. A place to store our collective learnings and keep track of each other. Check it out here: www.cloudania.com

Last week our Hyper Island agency Next Week was invited to participate in a pitch announced by Bonnier. The assignment was to create a digital hub for Bonnier family segment – mama.se, viforaldrar.se and alltombarn.se – that would draw parents to the Bonnier family magazines online. Being a mom, the task had a great appeal to me, so I became part of the pitch team together with two other Next Week members, Linn and Fatih. We came up with the concept ReadySteadyBaby, a service targeting first-time parents. A couple of days after our presentations, Bonnier announced that ReadySteadyBaby was the pitch winner and expressed their intention to get back to us for further collaboration in the near future.