Generate Ideas

Idea Generation

Generation of ideas is the stage where you let your creative juice flow out of your mind! Come up with as many ideas as possible so that you can filter them to determine key ideas to further develop in the development. There’s no right or wrong ideas, I’d recommend draw anything you think may have potentials. You can then annotate which one is more successful than others.

Here are some techniques you can use to show a diversity of design approaches in your folio:

Brain dumping is about setting time (for example, 10 minutes) to concentrate on generating ideas. This method forces you to simply ‘dump’ ideas on the paper, resulting in getting more ideas efficiently.
SCAMPER is a framework to extend your ideas and stands for 'Substitute, Combine , Adapt , Modify , Put to Another Use, Eliminate , Reverse'

How do I go from nothing to something?

During this stage, designers respond to the research undertaken and generate a wide range of ideas. The generation of ideas can be recorded, including written brainstorms, thumbnails, and visualisation drawings. Drawings at this stage are produced with media that is quick and doesn’t require time to perfect (pencil and a fine liner are examples). These are not polished or refined drawings and the annotations beside them assist in explaining the idea. The designs being created at this stage are still fresh in the mind of the designer and not fully visualised. That is, the ideas created at this stage are starting points.

Generating Ideas can include:

brainstorming with words
mind mapping
visualisation drawings
brief and lengthy annotations
pencil and/or fine liner illustrations
marker drawings or the use of media that is quick to assist in generating ideas quickly
notes taken from discussing ideas with other designers or the client
the generation of a broad range of ideas
visualisation drawings developed from observational drawings
creative design thinking techniques such as SCAMPER or Forced Associations
the interpretation and development of any mood boards
use of the design elements and principles to generate or extend an idea.

Use SCAMPER to Extend Your Ideas

Remember SCAMPER

Substitute Consider replacing all or part of your design with alternative options.

Combine Create something new by combining parts of the design or introducing new combinations.

Adapt Think about how the use of function of the design could be changed to suit a different purpose or set of circumstances.

Modify Consider radical change to all or part of the design. Think about the distortion of some aspects.

Put to Another Use Think about how the design could be used in another way. Could an aspect be sourced from another design?

Eliminate Reflect on what could be removed from the design. "Less is more", or is it?

Reverse Consider completely "flipping' one or more aspects of the design. Physically or conceptually.

SCAMPER Template

To consider your design in the greatest depth, make a copy of the template below and complete it.

Scamper Template

For Your Portfolio

Tertiary Minimum 2 Pages, Accredited Minimum 1 Page

C Level (ish)

Have a go at creating a logo for your cereal company. You can hand-draw this or use a simple drawing program as it is your first-draft.
Complete a SCAMPER design as shown in the video above.
Annotate your design and analyse:

Which of the designs you think best suits the company and target audience.
Which is the least likely to suit and why?
Would you combine elements from a few of your designs?

B Level (ish)

Complete the above steps
Annotate each design you have done for each element of SCAMPER and explain how it reflects that element

A Level (ish)

Complete the above steps
Complete the SCAMPER table provided above

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