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.

Netizens movie from Natasha Ehlén on Vimeo.

CLIENT Hyper Island / Millennium Promise
BRIEF Raise awareness about the Millennium Promise, an organization committed to ending poverty by 2025, and increase the number of donators. The target group: young urban people aged 18-24.
MY ROLE Concept, script, movie production.
CREDITS Collaboration with Lisa Hoffman, Fredrik Holmberg and Sougwen Chung.

The campaign website features different areas of extreme living. You can either chose one that you think suits your personality, or let IKEA find your extreme by tapping into social media and analyzing your online presence.

Chose which room you want to organize, and Drill Sergeant Extreme will help you to to get rid of the mess in no time. Or take a photo of the disorder and get product suggestions for storage and organizing.

IKEA Extreme Sleeping App will guide you to a good sleep. Start with choosing a good sleeping position and go on to counting sheep. When you have fallen asleep, your social media status will be updated by “Natasha has fallen asleep after 35 sheep”. The sleep meter will track your sounds and motion during the night, providing you with a chart over your sleep.

CLIENT Hyper Island / IKEA
MY ROLE Concept, design
BRIEF Create greater awareness of IKEA and their products. Communicate clearly how IKEA can offer exceptional quality and a great value for money.
CREDITS Collaboration with Anna-Maria Larsson, Filip Hammarnäs and Waldemar Wegelin

The final module of the Interactive Art Director program at Hyper Island, the Agency, has started! For seven weeks, we are going to run our own agency working with real paying clients. Like a real-world agency, we’ll have a CEO and project managers, we’ll handle budgets and keep track of our time and revenues. We can also chose to pitch for clients, and the agency who wins the pitch, gets additional resources to do the job. Given the real-life clients, this module will probably be one of the most exciting, and I am looking forward to getting my hands dirty.

We are a team of 11 people, a new constellation that I feel quite happy about. The three clients we are going to work with are Aftonbladet, United Stages and Fjords – varied enough for everyone to be excited at least about one. After a surprisingly short brainstorming session, we  picked a name for our agency. Next Week was born.

CLIENT Kinorurik
MY ROLE Art direction, design, web design

Here are some interesting insights on portfolio and hiring that he shared with us.

1. The position is irrelevant. All agencies are looking for independent problem-solvers. Being able to do meaningful work independently is the most important thing.
2. Agencies have no time. Help them create it. Make a teaser trailer for your portfolio. Identify windows of time.
3. Show the person behind the portfolio, the telling details that make you memorable (sth in your portfolio show bear proof of what kind of person you are)
4. Don’t be perfect. Be personable. (even work that is not great shows that you can grow)
5. You want to learn. Be able to teach, as well. (agencies want to hire people that can teach them something – mix your ability with a little bit of attitude)
6. All agencies are secretly divas. Do your research.
7. A portfolio is not a campaign in itself. Make sure people see it.
8. Hiring is a group decision – support sharing (make sure the portfolio can be passed around)
9. Share a vision – what do you want to achieve in the future?
10. Create talk value, but keep it simple.