Shelter

Phase 3: Ideation

Continuation of the Shelter Charity Design Project.

← Phases 1 and 2: Understand and Define | Phase 3: Ideation | → Continue to Phases 4 and 5: Iterative Design, Prototyping and Testing cycle

Phase 3: Ideation

Our ideation phase was split into two separate workshops. After running the initial workshop concerning problem statements, the design team had some great ideas as a team on what we could build. However, we quickly realized that the ideas were rather vague and abstract and we decided to poke the team some more to get more specificity.

I organized the bulk of each workshop, selecting ideation techniques from my previous training at the Norman Nielsen Group and brought my ideas forward to the other designers. We picked which exercises we’d like to try with the wider team together, based on which exercises we thought would bring the most benefit to our project.

Workshop prep

As the previous format of "warm-up, reminder and grouping" worked very well, I decided to build on this.
The exercises going forward included warm up exercises such as “opposite day” where the prompt to the team was to create a terrible washing machine, just to get the creative juices flowing, to “big ideas” which aims to generate as many ideas as possible to refine later, and “PSR – Problems, Solutions, Results” where we generated results to a given problem and then collectively tried to bridge the gap to find solutions.

Part of the PSR exercise.

I also got my team to sketch by doing “Crazy 8s” where they had to draw out 8 ideas in the span of 8 minutes as well as “Lightning Demos” – an exercise where you sketch ideas and put together a selfexplanatory concept board that would then be presented by another team.

Two examples of the Crazy 8s sketching warm-up exercise.

I liaised with our charity mentor for this exercise. As they were a neutral party, I asked them to present the finalized concept boards.

One of the teams' concept boards, photographed and uploaded onto Mural so we could critique it as a team.

Despite my team mates initially being hesitant about the idea, it ended up being an excellent exercise as people reported it got them to think about what they were trying to solve in-depth and we had been able to come up with specific features we could take forward to prioritize and create.

I set up the mural boards used for each workshop, created the template we would use going forward, wrote the outline for the sessions which the content designer would then refine, and kicked off the meetings.

The design team rotated who was facilitating each individual exercise so we’d get equal experience in facilitating.

After a prioritizing workshop hosted by product, we had a rough MVP in place that the designers could work towards.

← Phases 1 and 2: Understand and Define | Phase 3: Ideation | → Continue to Phases 4 and 5: Iterative Design, Prototyping and Testing cycle