Wild Cards: A Tool for Ideation and Brainstorming
Improving visual communication through ideation and design challenges.
My experience in multiple team projects in school, hackathons, and brainstorming sessions were all very different from one another. I’ve used various tools and methods for generating ideas and communicating with teammates. Especially jumping into a team and meeting the members for the first time, sometimes, it can be awkward at first. In order for success, it’s important to build a level of trust and become comfortable with different personalities on a team in order to succeed in team projects. Let’s break the ice and create a fun team building/problem-solving activity that doesn’t involve any seriousness or competition.
Need Finding with Users
Looking back into my experience in a school project (Design management) with a group of designers, our timeline was our biggest challenge and I would have hoped to have more collaboration IRL and brainstorming sessions. Most of the work was completed remotely and we would have bi-weekly online meetings each week. When we finally meet IRL, we were more responsive, collaborative, and we picked up the pace with our agenda and tasks. Due to the timeline, we did not spend a lot of time brainstorming solutions and expanding on our ideas. In order to pick up the pace, one member quickly brainstormed an idea and we were all onboard with it. The user flows are quickly discussed and collectively approved by the group. During our presentation, I wish we had more time to map out the user flows, scenarios, and create a visualization that would capture a holistic view of our idea in front of a class of design students.
Last month, I took part in a design challenge workshop and studio tour at Konrad Group. The workshop involved tackling a design challenge: brainstorming and ideating, creating a low-fidelity user flow, and presenting it in front of our peers and employees of the studio. My group of ~8 members worked together towards crafting a visualization of our ideas in the most efficient way possible. Instead of creating a high-level user flow in under a time limit, we focused too much on the details such as the content/copy. With this whiteboarding challenge, we’ve struggled with collectively determining a way to visually communicate our ideas.
More research and process work in this link.
How might we improve visual communication and systems thinking in order to stimulate learning and exploration?
Inspiration
Tom Wujec’s DrawToast methodology sparked my interest. The idea is simple yet complicated where teams and individuals are given 3 minutes to sketch out the process of making toast. The most interesting part of the outcome was that the diagrams had the same idea, but different in visual organization and presentation, which shows how different individuals think. This prompted me to create an exercise that helps teams and individuals to map out information and processs in different types of visualization methods.
Who is this for?
Whiteboarding brainstorming sessions IRL are low budget and insightful information can be generated from these exercises. Solving design challenges are embedded in design interview processes, classroom activities, workshops, and project teams. Exercising the mind is a great way to think on the spot, generate innovative ideas, and build a strong relationship with a team. Target audience: designers, educational institutions, workplaces project teams, newly formed teams, company sponsored workshops, design courses, and hackathon workshops.
How it works
Three Decks of Cards
- Design Prompt: A simple “How To” prompt is the problem that the participants must solve. These prompts are generic and simple that most people know the solution to. Thus, participants are able to focus on visualizing their solution.
- Ideation Method: “Diagrams” and “Illustrations & Labels” are ideation methods for visualizing abstract thinking and ideas. Participants are exposed to various ideation methods to visualize their solution.
- Creative Challenge: “Use 2 colors” and “Use stick figures” are fun challenges that participants can use in presenting their solutions. Participants can creatively incorporate these challenges into their solution however way they want. These quirky challenges help participants think creatively and have fun with the activity.
Visual Brand Identity
Instruction Guide
Reflection
Drawing inspiration from my experiences in multiple team projects, as well as whiteboarding challenges, I wanted to design something that helps designers flex their skills and thinking with these design exercises. Visualizing your thinking onto paper or whiteboard is important for expressing your complex ideas to other designers, client, manager, or other stakeholders. There are various ways to brainstorm and present ideas and processes such as card sorting, mindmaps, wireframe drawings, etc. This design management tool exposes the various ideation methods to help visualize and present complex ideas. Perfect for icebreakers or a quick workshop exercises for newly formed groups.
