Brainstorming, Brainsketching, Bodystorming

Design-Thinking method: Brainstorming, Brainsketching, Bodystorming

The word Brainstorming was coined by Alex Faickney Osborn (1888-1966) in his book “Your Creative Power”, published in 1948. Brainstorming, literally a storm of ideas, is a highly efficient technique for eliciting the generation of a great number of ideas within a short time span. The main principle of brainstorming is “suspended judgment”; indeed, the creative solutions arising from brainstorming should not initially consider an idea's viability or possible implications. Brainstorming encourages creativity and discourages criticism during the idea generation phase. It is important not to concentrate on the quality of each idea, but to strive for quantity. Every idea is potentially a good idea, and must be recorded and evaluated, selecting suitable criteria for judgment, at a later stage. Indeed, the evaluation of ideas is separated from the creation. This technique requires a cooperative environment in which freewheel thought associations are encouraged. Indeed ideas by one group member are used by other group members to come up with more ideas. Osborn calls this “contagion” and “chain reaction”. We can use brainstorming to solve all kinds of problems (business, public administration, military, family, personal). It is important to have a problem that is specific and can be made into a question.

Two interesting variations of Brainstorming techniques are:

• Brainsketching is an idea generation technique that uses sketching as the primary means of recording ideas. More info HERE.
• Bodystorming is a method to generate ideas that involve physical exploration and discovery enabling understanding of assumptions and problems. More info HERE.

How to:

1. The facilitator guides the team through the activity, making sure to uphold a good environment, and that all members participate, without wasting energy on topics far from the session's objective.
2. The facilitator opens the session by briefly presenting the challenge at hand. Some facts / details of the problem are also provided. To make sure that everyone has understood the goal, it is helpful to go round the table asking participants to recap the objective in their own words.
3. The rules of brainstorming are then introduced, providing an explanation and the scope of each, and creating the correct setting for the activity. There are four essential rules to brainstorming: avoid criticism and suspend judgment; produce many ideas; welcome freewheel tthough; combine and improve other people’s ideas. Ice-breakers are very effective in establishing a good atmosphere at the beginning of the session.
4. Three essential initial suggestions: get comfortable, manage distractions, and hang everything up on the walls. It is important to be in a different position from the one in which work is usually carried out, and that there be no interruptions. Switch off your phone!
5. Provide post-its and felt-tip pens. Ask that ideas be written individually on a post-it and read out loud before being pasted to the wall. Encourage participants to visualize their ideas. The idea generation phase may be freewheel (participants may speak at any moment), or round the table (going round the table to allow each member of the team to speak).
6. Strive for quantity, not for quality of ideas. Once the production phase is exhausted, group ideas into clusters, evaluating their potential and viability as a team.

You can download the IDEActivity method cards from the Materials page, along with all the other Resources in the course.