Generation Phase

Having ideas, exploring opportunities, developing concepts

GENERATION is all about inspiring new ideas and exploring opportunities to improve a particular system in school. We'll develop new ideas working as a team and collaboratively with others in workshops and brainstorms. Our job here is to be creative and to help others to be creative too. This means asking questions that trigger ideas and visualising ideas so that we can discuss and build on them.

GENERATION of ideas needs stimulus. Stimulus is fuel for creative thinking. We use stimulus all the time. Looking through a catelogue is helpful when you need a gift idea for someone's birthday or want to redecorate you kitchen. Some people think about how a particular person or company might solve a problem. If Tesco ran the school canteen what would it be like? This might sound like a strange question to ask and it might trigger some strange ideas - but there might just be something in the answer that acually makes sense. Sometimes asking an unlikey question can trigger an amazing idea.

It's really important that we make our ideas visual - or even make a model of them. You learn a lot about an idea simply by trying to make it real. This doesn't have to mean spending a lot of time. Making an idea real also helps others to understand it and make suggestions about making it better.

We'll use the GENERATION stage to come up with ideas in response to each of the design challenges we came up with in the DISCOVERY stage. We may find that some of the challenges are less interesting than we thought they would be - or that another one appears that we like even more.

Things that we'll have at the end of this phase:

Loads of ideas for improving on the design challenges

Words and pictures to communicate these ideas

The results of some early experients to see if the ideas are any good

A plan of action for the next stage



Posted by engine on 02/01