Ideas Ideas Ideas

During this week's class, we were able to provide feedback and brainstorm with two different "future" ventures: one of which was for-profit while the other was non-profit.

I was actually quite surprised by the fact that they both seemed to be struggling with relatively the same issues, namely idea generation. I understand that they were both in the very early phases of development and the for-profit venture already had a general idea of what their product or solution would be, but they were both still trying to gather feedback from users and hoping to generate new ideas to incorporate into the solution.

This “prototyping” of sorts only leads me to call on what I have learned during my time at the d.school here at Stanford. From my own work on projects, I’ve learned that generating viable ideas for solutions is a very tough thing to do. Part of the philosophy that I appreciate of the design methodology taught at the d.school is that of generating as many ideas as you can think of in a short amount of time. Many times this leads to completely out of the box ideas (some completely ridiculous!) but undoubtedly will in some way or another generate at least a jumping off point for a new idea.

Someone recently shared this quote from www.kottke.org, which I also think is a good summary of the d.school’s method of prototyping and ideation and really exemplifies the benefits that can arrive from working toward quantity over quality when ideating:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

I’m curious about what methodology both ventures that spoke to us during class had used to generate ideas. I suppose the non-profit venture was still in the very very early stages and was still scoping out what her venture would look like. The for-profit, however, seemed to have already generated several ideas about other features for their solution. Perhaps they also tried throwing out as many ideas as possible. Using us as a means for more ideas was also probably a smart idea ;-)