REFLECTION – VISUALIZATION & MIND MAPPING

CHALLENGE  Design thinking is a well-defined approach to generate and experiment with ideas in an Innovation driven  organization. Working in such organization with a user centric design approach, requires continuous  innovation for new business exploration as well as to improve existing products designs. I’m a design and  innovation lead from such organization focusing on consumer electronics. I’m a member of new business  exploration and my/our challenge is to improve the functionality of a certain product segment by  conducting ideation workshops across cross-functional teams.

The scope of the workshop is to generate ideas on a specific product segment based on themes such as  (i)Multi-functional usage; (ii) Performance improvement; (iii)Weight and Size reduction; respectively.  Then select the top 2 ideas from each themes for detailed conceptual designing and pitch the concepts to  top management team of our organization.

SELECTION  Since the idea generation process involves various insights from various stake holders, the design thinking  tools such as Visualization, Brainstorming and Mind mapping were applied. These tools were thought to  help our stake holders to convey their imagination in a pictorial/graphical form and guide them to find  patterns and insights from their ideas. As we know, Visualization is a tool where a pictorial or graphical  form helps us clearly understand the idea/insight rather in a verbal/written form. Whereas, Brainstorming  allows the person to map his experience and learning to generate ideas for a certain use case.  And mind  mapping allows to identify patterns & insights in available data.

APPLICATION  For this ideation workshop, a total of 18 people from cross-functions were teamed into 3 consisting of  various age groups and work experience. All the 18 people were familiar with the product segment  chosen. Then, each team is allocated a theme as mentioned earlier and they were requested to brainstorm  their ideas based on allocated theme. Each person of the team were requested to provide at least 5 ideas,  Write/Picture them on sticky notes and stick them on respective walls provided. 20 minutes were given  for brainstorming their ideas and post them on the wall.

As a next activity, with a pool of ideas on the wall, each group were requested to find for any  insights/patterns between their ideas and group them based on certain aspects. Each team members of  the group discussed their ideas within themselves and came up with a conclusive classification. Then we  went through a sharing session of all the ideas from each team with a question/answer session. The entire  session went about 30 minutes explaining their insights and their idea classification approach.

For the next activity, each team were requested to select top 2 ideas and create a graphic  picture/representation of the concept in a poster size along with a justification of ‘Why/How it works?’;  ‘What problem it solves?’; Challenges?; This activity went through about 15 minutes followed by a  presentation session by each team.  As the teams presented their concepts with visual designs and  justification, I/we began recording the insights from each group.

Once the session is completed, we digitized the top 2 ideas from of each team and compiled the shared  insights to a concept proposals for pitching it to our management team.

INSIGHT & APPROACH  The outcome of this ideation workshop was obtaining a refined Concept with a shared insights from  various stake holders of various functions. The team members had a collaborative approach to identify a  problem and generate a valuable idea. The Visualization of ideas presented by each team helped everyone  to picturize the concept in the same perspective of the presenter. The team members were sportive in  their brainstorming sessions, sharing their individual insights by uncovering the pattern and connections  between other ideas. This clearly demonstrates their mind mapping approach. Thus, the design thinking  tools that we used for this ideation workshop had a positive outcome with a valuable concept being  generated.

Overall, it is essential for any innovation workshop to have a design thinking process and utilize the  respective tools in a valuable way. We also decided to include Story telling tool from our next workshop  to pitch the concepts in an attractive way!

