One of the trickier parts of any design sprint is having learners brainstorm on a topic they don’t yet feel confident with. Getting them to come up with ideas or suggestions quickly and in quantities to get a good result is always tricky and tends to get bogged down. This is often exacerbated during ideation when they’re halfway through a program and are yet to put their first prototypes together.
The best solution I’ve found is a box, and a stack of paper squares. 1 idea per square, as soon as it’s written walk it up and put it in your team’s box.
For a group of 4 learners, I normally get ~75 ideas in 20 minutes. This isn’t going to work if you haven’t put in some time during empathy to understand the problem, or built enough trust for anyone to start, but with that foundation, this has been the most effective addition to my facilitation toolbox.
And these boxes are nothing fancy, I normally raid our makerspace for some that are on the way to recycling. The magic comes from what the box achieves, and how it changes learner interactions through 3 main processes.
Get Moving
I give each team a single box and ask them to place it somewhere in line of site but at least 4 meters away from their station, far enough that they have to stand up and walk. The act of walking each idea up to the box and putting it in exaggerates the work and achievement, and also prevents them from getting too content with sitting and writing a list. It keeps them active and moving all the time.
Proof of Work
It’s easy to say “Oh well, that other team probably hasn’t done much either” when you’re all writing at a table. When learners see others walking up they can see that others are actually doing more than they thought. For some, this will create a competitive spark and get them to write down anything just for the chance to take it up.
Hidden Progress
The other limitation this overcomes for some learners is that it avoids their ability to claim their “finished” after the first 5 or so are done. Because they can’t see the ideas they have written down they have no metric to claim their finished, and the empty space in front of them applies more pressure to fill it.
Used correctly this is a great tool for supporting any rapid generation process. What tools do you have to help learners create more ideas fast? Comment below with your favourites.
