Suppose having ideas is a skill.
How would you practice to hone in your skill?
Conceived midst pandemic in work from home isolation, this 20 minute workshop is like “hitting the Design Gym™” with your colleagues.
During this workshop, participants will get prompted, ideate potential solutions, and then share out to their team.
Lateral thinking
Brainstorm
20 minutes
Drawing surface
Timer
Design prompt generator
You can do this exercise on your own or with others. If you need structure, load up a design challenge generator. This will give you a problem to riff on and focus. Overtime you can bypass this generator and jump straight into writing down ideas based on a theme you care about. Keep it your set up simple!
Set a timer for 5 minutes and start writing down as many ideas as you can. Aim for quantity, not quality. Try to write at least 20 ideas down. Write before you know what you’re writing. Trust that the words will come.
When the 5 minutes are up, pick your favorite of these and start sketching out a design. The idea here is to play with the concept and de-abstract it, how would you make it real?
If you’re doing this exercise as a group, share out your idea. Walk people through your ideation process. Did you spot any patterns in your ideas? Where were you constrained? What came easy? If you’re on your own, meditate over your process.
Producing ideas is all about the headspace and mentality.
Overtime, this exercise will teach you that ideas are an infinite resource. As a bonus, cataloging these over time will also build a nice little vault for you to tap into in the future.
You’ll be “somebody with ideas.”
One thing I noticed is the nature of my ideation tends to be derivative, meaning I tend to start riffing on a theme. This is totally fine.
Practice this enough, and you’ll become somebody who is confident to “brainstorm” on the spot and think aloud with others.
No more hiding in your studio. Let your genius shine.
"The more you use, the more you have." - Maya Angelou on creativity, Poet
"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." - Linus Pauling, Chemist, Nobel Prize Winner
Check back later for examples! - JJ 3/7/23
How to become an idea machine
They say great artists steal. This exercise is fully inspired by James Altucher's blog post. He wrote a book, but I think you can get the gist of it from this post.
REad more on his blog