Amplifying Creativity: A New Approach to Group Design Ideation Sessions

Brianna Koch at UXDX Community: From Ideation to Delight in Design. Video: https://youtu.be/qEvp5odTCg0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why ideation deserves its own investment

[00:00:00] All right, hi everybody. I'm Brianna, or you can call me Bri. I'm really excited to share my talk with you today: amplifying creativity, a new approach to group design ideation sessions. I've been a designer for eight years now, and in those eight years I've done a lot of design ideation in many forms for many problems.

[00:00:18] Now, while today's talk is framed around group ideation workshops, at its core this is really just a talk about better design ideation, and how to structure your ideation to match how our brains do their best creative thinking. So really the takeaways are for anyone, whether you're a design team of one or you work on a large team, whether you work remotely or hybrid or in person. If you ideate, or if you facilitate ideation spaces, this talk is for you.

[00:00:48] I want our 25 minutes to be worth your time, and so my goal is for you to leave with actionable steps that you can apply in your individual or group ideation. So what are you trading your time for? You're trading your time for a new group ideation workshop format and practical tips that you can apply in your ideation process that can yield better, more creative designs. This will be backed by my own personal experience, but also neuroscience and psychology evidence, so that you're not just taking my word for it.

[00:01:17] Right off the bat I'll tell you the main idea of this talk, which is that group design ideation workshops will yield better, more creative designs when you diverge asynchronously. Before I even get into why this works, it's probably really helpful for us to get on the same page about group ideation workshops and what we're talking about when I say diverging asynchronously. So we'll start with those basic definitions.

[00:01:41] First, diverging versus converging. Diverging refers to the parts in the ideation process where we're generating a lot of different potential ideas. This is typically followed up by converging, where we're selecting, combining and refining from the ideas that we generated.

[00:02:00] We're also going to talk a lot today about asynchronous ideation compared to synchronous ideation, and what does that mean? If you're here on this webinar with me live, this is a synchronous presentation: we're here together at the same time. But if you're watching a recording of this webinar later, it's asynchronous: we're engaging in this activity, I'm speaking and you're listening, at separate times.

[00:02:23] Let's talk about how this can be applied in our creative ideation workshops. To do that, let's establish when we're doing design ideation, or solution ideation. I want to put this in the context of the five stages of design thinking, where we first empathize and then define those problems, ideate solutions to them, prototype those solutions and test them. Does this design thinking process always look as clean and as linear as this diagram suggests? Surely not. But what I like about it is that it tries to show that typically we start thinking through potential solutions during this ideate phase, after we've empathized or defined, which translates to: we've researched and we now have a shared understanding of the problem.

[00:03:12] When we're doing our ideation, we might employ different methods or different activities to ideate on solutions. One of those activities that we might use are collaborative workshops that solicit a diverse range of perspectives and ideas from a team. How these design workshops are structured can take many forms, and there are many different ideation activities that we can use. But typically what I see is some form of what you'll see on this slide: a group will come together and they'll review the problem that they need to solve. They'll do some sort of sketching or brainstorming activity; that's the diverging, the generating solutions portion. Then they'll share those designs with each other, discuss, and perhaps vote on the designs that they like; that's the converging. And then they'll leave that activity, hopefully with an idea of what they should carry forward into prototyping and further validation.

[00:04:09] For me these days, as someone who works remotely, these activities look a little bit more like this, where we're substituting a conference room for a Zoom and a whiteboard for a FigJam board. But in theory it's all the same: we're doing some independent ideation in the session, followed by discussion, and then some consensus building on what should move on to that next phase of prototyping.

[00:04:32] Going back to these five stages of design thinking, in my observations I think so much emphasis is put on the empathize phase, or that research phase, which I wouldn't say is wrong. I do think that good research is absolutely necessary to having a successful design. However, sometimes I think that we assume that by having good research it's automatically going to result in a good design, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think that just like it's worth investing in doing research to make sure that we're solving the right problems, it's worth it to invest in ideation to make sure that we're solving these problems to the best of our abilities, and that we're starting with a super strong design foundation that we can continue to iterate from.

[00:05:22] My experience and my observations, as someone who works or has worked primarily in agile tech companies, is that these types of companies move fast. The ideas that come out of the ideate phase are going to be prototyped and tested, and we will learn and we'll tweak and we'll continue to improve that base idea. But what I found is that we're very unlikely to scrap everything and start over if it's not testing perfectly, because that's costly, and the business will often favor making the existing design better rather than starting over from scratch. Because the sad reality, as a designer, is that the business often just wants a design that's good enough. For me that's motivating. It should motivate us to invest time in the ideate phase, especially for these large problems, when we're going to be investing a lot of time in building a solution.

From one workshop to two meetings with a break

[00:06:14] Before I had thought about experimenting with my ideation workshop format, going back to what I showed earlier, this is what that typical ideation workshop looked like. They were typically run as a one and a half, maybe two-hour synchronous workshop, where the team all came together and we went through the diverging and converging parts of ideation all in that one session. For the sake of time today I'm not going to touch on what led me to start experimenting with this format. I'll just say that, based on some lackluster results from some ideation workshops that I held over Zoom, I started to question whether or not sitting on a Zoom, or just being together for an hour or two, was really enabling us to produce our most valuable ideas.

[00:06:58] Perhaps you've been in a situation where you've put together an ideation workshop with the hope that you're going to bring everybody together and you're going to produce some great ideas, and maybe not all of those workshops have been as fruitful as you had hoped. What I've landed on is that when our ideation is restricted with time-boxed activities like these, where we've put so much hope into magic happening in a two-hour period, this is pretty counter to how our brains actually solve problems.

[00:07:30] Because of that, this is what that format eventually evolved to. The main difference is that I split my ideation workshop into essentially three parts, which were two separate meetings with a large break in between. The first meeting was the initial context building and brainstorming meeting, where we come together, we're making sure we understand the problem, and we start that brainstorming. But then I started giving my teams a break of a few days, maybe even a week, and in that time allowing them to just ideate and come up with any other solutions that come to mind on their own time. That is the asynchronous diverging portion of this activity.

[00:08:10] Then we had a second follow-up meeting, where we come together again to share any ideas that we came up with in that time, discuss all of the ideas that we came up with in that first meeting and in our time apart, and then start to converge and decide on what we wanted to move forward with. When I started using this format, I experienced that myself and my teammates came back to our second meeting with ideas that were better, and oftentimes a lot more creative. So let's talk about why that might be.

[00:08:40] First, I invite you to reflect on when your best design ideas come to you. I wonder if your best design ideas typically come to you when you're sitting down to do design, or if it's something that happens more sporadically. I do think that design ideation workshops can generate great ideas, but I don't think that it's always a guarantee that you're going to have a fantastic idea come to you in that one-hour, two-hour period. For me personally, I think that my best ideas, my most creative ideas, have come to me outside of activities like these.

The neuroscience of aha moments

[00:09:15] Why might that be? First, I think that video conferencing and synchronous meetings, and I think there are studies to show this, are just unconducive to generating aha moments. An aha moment being that experience of having an answer to a prominent or a nagging problem in your mind come to you at a seemingly random moment. But is that a real thing that happens to us, or is it just something we think happens? If it's actually happening, is it truly random? If it's random, what's causing it to happen? And they're pretty nice. I love having a good idea come to mind; I imagine everyone else does. So if it's something that we can control, how could we make them happen more?

[00:09:58] This is where this talk will dive more into the psychology and the neuroscience behind creativity, which is the goal of a design workshop: creating or generating creative solutions. In our profession, I imagine we're all trying to foster environments where that happens.

[00:10:13] So are aha moments real? There's really strong evidence to support it. Neuroscientists have conducted studies measuring fMRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging, and EEG, which is electroencephalography. It doesn't really matter; they've measured brain activity, essentially, to pinpoint the moment that answers pop into our head. Which is cool, because we know now that we can actually see this happening. We have somewhat of a neural signature of an aha moment.

[00:10:43] There are different conditions that lend themselves to our brains having these aha moments, and part of it is the type of thought that our brain is engaged in. How we think about and how we solve problems can be split into two categories: we have our analytic thought and we have our insightful thought. Our analytic thought is very judicial, systematic; it's left brain. Our insightful thought is more creative or spontaneous, and right brain.

[00:11:12] Your analytic thought is what you think of as thinking. It's what you do when you're sitting down to actively think and work on a problem. Your insightful thought, I feel like it operates as more of a sensation, where ideas seem to float or pop into our minds. This type of thought doesn't actually feel like you're thinking at all, in a way, but your mind is still very actively at work behind the scenes. It's just waiting for a stimulus to come and connect the dots. Both can help us generate ideas, and both are a huge part of creativity; they just happen in different ways.

[00:11:50] To talk about how they contribute to our creativity, I think it helps to have a definition of creativity, which turns out to be a difficult thing to define. This is a quote that I really love from two psychology and neuroscience professors and authors who studied aha moments. They define creativity as "the ability to reinterpret something by breaking it down into its elements and then recombining those elements in a surprising way to achieve some goal." With analytic thought, you can think of having your elements and just trying them in different arrangements until you get to some idea. But with insightful thought, you might look at what you have available to you, and then perhaps a novel or a creative combination of those elements just appears, and an idea comes into your mind.

[00:12:40] A good illustration of this in action would be word games like Scrabble, or in this example here I have a partial screenshot of the game Wordscapes. In this mobile game you're given a set of letters, that set of letters I show there in the circle, and you need to rearrange all or a subset of those letters in as many ways as you can to form words. An analytic approach to this game would be to look at these letters and then to try to combine them until you get to a word. So D-R-L, not a word; D-R, not a word; but you'd keep trying combinations until eventually you get to something that seems like a word. An insightful approach is to look at this combination of letters and just have a sudden realization of a way that you can combine them into a word.

[00:13:29] If you were to look at these letters, as you're looking at them now, did a combination of them just jump out at you? Do you see a word, or would you have to think about it and perhaps move them around until a word comes to mind? Perhaps you're looking at this and you see "hurdle" right away, or maybe you see "hurled" or "ruled" or "duel" or "rude", or nothing. It doesn't really matter. There's not a right or a wrong way to think, and one is definitely not better than the other. It just goes to show that there are different ways that our brains might take these elements and combine them, and one might be a little bit more active than the other, or feel a little bit more active.

Immersion, incubation and illumination

[00:14:03] As you all probably know, we're not walking around having these aha moments of creative genius all the time. This is because we can't constantly be thinking insightfully, and that's because we employ different types of thought at different parts in the creative process. Different books, organizations, institutions, thought leaders all have various versions of the creative process, and everyone uses different names and a various number of steps to this process. I like to boil it down to the three I's, which are immersion, incubation and illumination.

[00:14:43] Immersion is the onset. It's when you start getting immersed in that problem, when you're reviewing the research and the data and you're starting to engage that analytic brain and actively thinking through ways that you can solve this problem. When you step away from that problem altogether and you're no longer immersed, your brain can move into incubation. When your brain starts to incubate on the problem, that's when you're letting the loose associations in the back of your mind start to form. And if you're lucky, while you're incubating you might have a creative illumination, which is when your insightful thought will yield a novel or a creative approach to solve that problem that you were immersed in earlier.

[00:15:25] What's really important to take away from the stages of creativity is that all three steps are necessary to having that creative illumination. Your analytic thought that you employ when you're immersed in a problem is necessary for that illumination of a creative idea later. Research shows us that the quality of creative ideas is a positive function of quantity, which means the more ideas that we generate, the higher the likelihood that we're going to produce a better idea eventually. So aha moments are only going to happen after you've spent time wrestling with a problem and then you give yourself space from it.

[00:16:03] When I'm talking about adding an asynchronous diverging portion to our design ideation workshops, what we're really trying to do is work in an incubation period. In the typical workshop format, where we're all together in a session for one to two hours, we're really in immersion the entire time, because we're all there actively working on solving the problem. These workshops aren't giving our minds the time to incubate and maximize our creativity, because we're expecting to walk away from these workshops with an answer.

[00:16:35] This makes incubation extremely important. It might sound and seem like a passive process, but how we incubate plays a huge role in whether or not we're going to generate more creative ideas, because what's happening here is we're trying to spark new pathways in our brains, and there are really actionable steps we can take to encourage these new pathways to form. So if we're going to give ourselves, and we're going to give others that we're ideating with, a few days to ideate independently, how do we set ourselves up to have a creative illumination? Let's walk through how we can make our incubation more likely to result in these aha moments of creative illumination.

Techniques for better incubation: breaks, movement and environment

[00:17:16] The first technique, which I personally love, is to take lots of breaks. What's really important to know is that your analytic thought and your insightful thought can't happen simultaneously. Oftentimes, when we stop thinking about a problem, like maybe I have this design problem, I need to think through some solutions and I want to take a break, oftentimes we just move on to thinking about another problem. We just redirect our mind's analytic capabilities elsewhere. But it's really important that we don't do that. I often have to encourage my team strongly, especially any developers that I'm ideating with, to not just jump into solving a coding problem. We need to just rest and relax and let our minds start to work behind the scenes. We need to distract ourselves from our analytic thought to be able to move from immersion to incubation.

[00:18:09] Ideally, when you're taking breaks, you can get your mind to a state of reduced awareness, and [ideas are] generated when we have a reduced awareness of our surroundings. This is why people often have ideas in the shower, or brushing their teeth, or when they're about to fall asleep. In those specific examples we're removing sensory input, whether it's what we see or what we hear, and that allows us to focus our attention inward, and not just at solving another problem. While we can't guarantee that someone's going to take a shower during their break, and that's not what I am encouraging, just by the act of taking a break you're more likely to start to focus that attention inward and really get into that incubation on a problem.

[00:19:00] The second technique is to move around. Sitting in your room, or sitting at your computer on a Zoom, is very detrimental to creativity. Culturally, or at least here in the US, we often see mind and body as very separate, and we really associate thinking with stillness and focus: being really dedicated, chained to your desk, really dedicated to tackling a problem. However, our cognitive load increases significantly when we're sitting still, but movement, on the other hand, can be key. Moderate exercise is shown to increase attention, problem-solving ability, decision-making ability, verbal fluency and working memory.

[00:19:41] There are a lot of studies to show that when participants are asked to do things like complex math problems in their heads, and they're getting their brain scanned, those brain scans show that there's increased cognitive load on people who are asked to not move while thinking. Exercise helps us because it releases neurochemicals that can help us with complex cognition. So doing things like taking a walk after you've started to do some brainstorming or think through a problem can be very beneficial for our problem-solving and creative abilities.

[00:20:13] The next tactic is to change your environment, and there are a couple of ways that you can think about changing it. The first is to seek open environments. Expansive or open surroundings can put our minds in a state more conducive to creative illumination. Nature especially is shown to be the most beneficial to our brains. You can think of it as an open environment making your brain more open to making connections. If we think back to that earlier definition of creativity, breaking things down into pieces and recombining them in a surprising way, you can think of an open environment as opening up our minds to possible new combinations.

[00:20:59] Another way to think about changing your environment is to just find a different environment. Unfamiliar surroundings can put our minds in a state more conducive to creative illumination as well. Putting yourself in a different place will give your brain a different way of thinking through a problem, because you're breaking your routine. When you're breaking a routine, you might get exposed to different stimuli that make you think differently, and that could be what you need to spark that new pathway in your brain. This could mean working somewhere that isn't your desk or your office, or it could mean getting outside the office altogether and doing something a little bit differently than you would in your normal routine.

Following your body's cues and capturing ideas

[00:21:39] The next technique is to follow your body's cues. People think differently at different points in the day. Your analytic thought is going to be better at your peak energy, and your insightful thought often takes over at your lower energy. So you want to crank through producing ideas when you're feeling productive and energized; that's a great time to be immersed and start actively brainstorming. But you want to step away from problems when you're feeling tired and your mind is hazy. When we schedule synchronous ideation workshops, you really don't know how people are going to be feeling in that moment. Me personally, I'm a morning person, and I love to crank through ideas and really think about problems in the morning. But if we work asynchronous ideation into our workshops, we're going to allow people to incubate ideas during the periods where their brain isn't functioning at its peak, which is more likely to lead to some illumination of creativity.

[00:22:34] The last technique is not really rooted in research, but I do find it to be really great advice: just take notes of ideas as soon as they appear to you. Ideas are often fleeting, and it just means that we want to write ideas down as soon as we have them, because they often don't last long. If I'm driving, I'm asking Siri to take a note, or if I'm about to fall asleep and something comes to mind, I grab my phone and I write it down. Oftentimes the creative idea that you have only exists in the moment that you have it, and you're not going to remember it later. But the act of capturing that idea is often what you need to spark new ideas. That one idea can be the start of a train of thought that leads you to your next great one. But the chances that you're going to remember it later are pretty low.

Putting it all together

[00:23:21] All right, we are getting close to the end, and we are about to put it all together, so let's do that. We talked about workshop formats, we talked about synchronous and asynchronous ideation, and we talked about the three stages of creativity, as well as analytic versus insightful thought. This is a way to try to show you how these all tie together. Above, we show the old workshop format, where ideation is done all together in one session. This is one synchronous meeting where we're immersed in the problem the entire time. This type of workshop is really set up to leverage our analytic brains, but it doesn't offer us the time and the space that we need to generate creative solutions.

[00:24:03] When we adapt our workshop into that multi-workshop format, with one first workshop, a break, and then a second one, all stages of creativity and both types of thinking can be accessed. I know this is a lot on one slide, so let's talk through it. In that first meeting we're starting that diverging process together, synchronously. We're actively in that immersion phase, we're all there utilizing our analytic brains. But by working in that break, or that asynchronous period for ideation, after that initial meeting, we're giving our brains the time and space to start to incubate on these problems that we've started thinking about. If we incubate well, with some of those techniques or conditions that we touched on earlier, we're going to have the best chance of our insightful brain leading us to those creative solutions. Then when we come together in that second synchronous meeting to discuss those ideas, we're very likely to come back with stronger, more creative ideas.

[00:25:01] This format works because it's set to take us through all stages of creativity and maximize our analytic thinking when it matters. But I will say that this specific format that I'm showing you is not what matters. You can really tweak any ideation activity in whatever way suits you, as long as you're allowing for those three stages of creativity to happen.

[00:25:23] To go back to that initial idea of the talk: I truly believe, and I have experienced, that group ideation workshops yield better, more creative designs when you diverge asynchronously, because it more closely follows the creative process and aligns with how our brains operate. It's even more likely to yield better outcomes when you employ some of those tactics that I shared today on how to incubate ideas better. That's it for me. I'll just really quickly share some of the books that I've read in the past year that really helped inform this talk, and I think hopefully we have at least a few minutes for questions. And this is me.

Q&A

[00:26:00] Host: Thank you so much, Bri, that was fantastic. There are questions; I'll drop you some on Slack after this, but I wanted to ask two that are really great. How many people would be in your workshops? Is there such a thing as too many or too few people in one of the workshops?

[00:26:21] Brianna: For me it's definitely going to be based off of how many people I have on an agile team. For me that's a cross-functional team of anywhere from three to six developers, a QA engineer, a product manager, and then myself. That's the typical group that I'm working with. I would say that in whatever case, there can be smaller teams. I think that it always helps to ideate with other people, so if you can have at least one other ideation partner, I think that's really helpful. The more ideas you can generate, the better. I don't have a magic number. I do think that at a certain point there would be too many, and when we're doing that idea generation and we're trying to converge all the ideas that we generated, that becomes a little bit unwieldy if we're talking about something very large, like a workshop with 20 people. So I would say generally my workshops have stayed maybe 10 or under, but there probably could be some good literature out there that tells you the most effective group size to work with.

[00:27:21] Host: No, that's an excellent answer, broken down really nicely. And how frequently do you run the workshops?

[00:27:29] Brianna: This really just depends on what phase of a project I am in with a team. Like I said, for problems that we're going to be working on for a long time, I might have a project running with a team for six months, maybe a year. We might be doing a really big, involved collaborative workshop like this at the beginning, and we might be doing some smaller design ideation along the way. But this could be once a year, or if we're moving on to a project more quickly, it could be in a few months. It usually is at the onset of something larger that I'm starting to do bigger ideation activities.

[00:28:04] Host: Yeah, fantastic. And are there any tools that you use to help with the workshop?

[00:28:09] Brianna: When I worked in person, this was always done with sticky notes and paper in a conference room, taping these designs onto the wall. But now, being remote, and I imagine I would still do this if I was working hybrid or in person, I really do just like to use a FigJam for these activities, and have the post-its and brainstorm there, and we can take pictures of our designs, or screenshots, and just throw them on that board. This could be a FigJam, it could be a Mural, it could be a Miro. I just like having a board that will exist after this activity. When I used to do these and put these designs on the wall, I'm taking photos of them, I'm trying to remember all the designs that we came up with. I think it really helps to have an artifact that's easily accessible that I can continue to go back to as we continue working on this project. So I like digital whiteboards like those.

[00:29:00] Host: Amazing. Thank you so much, Bri, that was really a fantastic talk, really nicely broken down. I'm sure people will love it tonight and will love it in their future as well. So thank you so much for joining us.

[00:29:11] Brianna: Thanks so much.