Reflection, Brainstorming 101

This past week, Dr. Michael Holmes, Professor of Communication Studies at Ball State University, assisted in teaching the Unclass on how to brainstorm.  Brainstorming seems to be such a trivial part of the design process, yet as a designer I have not fully understood what it means or how to correctly brainstorm.  Dr. Holmes began the lecture by outlining some of the barriers to creativity and brainstorming within a group environment.  These include:

Power and status relations - Often times, those with a higher status will guide a group in a certain way, which could often be the wrong way.

People’s fear of judgement - Let’s be honest.  People are afraid to be wrong.  If people have an idea and they think they will be judged, they will typically keep their mouth shut.

Left brain process - People often get caught up in thinking analytically.  We forget fail on using the creative part of our brain.

Competition of the floor -  With one person leading the group, often more shy individuals will fail to get involved in the conversation, thus their views and ideas are overlooked.

After listing these topics, Dr. Holmes referred back to the barrier, “People’s fear of judgement.”  This is a big one.  In a group setting, it is of the utmost importance to postpone judgement.  By doing this, the group will generate more ideas.  In the case of brainstorming, quantity is better than quality.  

Later, Dr. Holmes outlined a process suitable for brainstorming:
1. Define the problem, goal as a creative challenge
2. Set a time limit or idea limit
3. Voice your ideas together - not “one idea from each in turn;” the goal of quantity, not quality
4. Postpone evaluation and criticism
5. As a team, select the top 5 or 10 ideas

With this process, Dr. Holmes then led a quick activity where tBR was asked the following:  Think of unisex wallet design that shows expresses the design firm as forward thinking.  The results are below:


Another process outlined is known as the Van de Ven’s Nominal Group Technique:
1. question, problem or goal is provided
2. timed rapid, silent, individual idea generation
3. round-robin pooling of ideas; duplicates eliminated; similar items clustered
4. discussion
5. [repeat if desired]
6. anonymous voting or ranking

With this process in mind, tBR was asked to design a contemporary desk for a college student.  Some of the results are listed below:

Overall, the brainstorming activity will be beneficial to tBR as we continue to look for our next design problem.