Introduction
In the Ideation phase, you are generating a range of ways to address the problem. Below are tools to help you keep widening and to ensure that you consider things that are too small, too large, too sentimental, too political, too awkward, too direct, etc.
Remember you are still in the divergence phase of your design process, in which widening possible interventions matters more than finding the best one.
CHeck out the ideation phase in our case studies!
Social Emergency Response Center (SERC)
Public Kitchen
Let’s Flip It
Lighting the Bridge
Tools for the Ideation Design Phase
Intervention Inspiration Challenge
Need to think beyond the expected, the possible, the upright? Intervention Inspiration Challenge is a simple tool to widen your ideas about your intervention.
We promise it will get you to some bad ideas, some hilarious ones, and just beyond that—the one that might really pop!
Perfectly Awful
Here's a fun challenge from DS4SI's early days, particularly good for using humor to help us critique our ideas without being too closely attached to them. "Perfectly Awful" invites you to picture some of the worst ways you could go about solving the problem you're addressing.
User Personas
Understanding the nuances of the people who we want to engage with our interventions is really helpful as we ideate and specify. This User Personas tool assumes that you are familiar with folks who would use your intervention. With that love and familiarity, make up some "personas" of your desired users. (It helps to find a really kooky set of action figures, so you stay playful and not too literal.)
Feeling stuck in the creative process? Need some inspiration?
When do I start specifying & converging?
Move onto the next phase, Specification, when you:
Have generated a list of possible ways of intervening that includes:
Really bad ideas,
Impolite ideas,
Impossible ideas
Ideas that make you giggle
Ideas that make you nervous
Ideas you didn’t have when you started this process
Some of your ideas don't seem reasonable or good. If all your ideas seem good or reasonable, stay in this phase until that’s no longer true.
Have thought of ideas with divergent thinkers. Would you benefit from thinking with more people—children, elders? CEOs? Crossing guards?
If that sounds like where you’re at, then:
Connecting Design with I-A-E
How do we know where to start designing for social change? We created a framework to help you read social situations through the lens of ideas, arrangements, and effects (I-A-E).
When we intervene at the scale of arrangements, we can create a more transformative change than if we just intervene in effects. By using design to intervene in existing arrangements and imagine new ones, we can produce new effects—ones that make a society more just and vibrant.