Phase 3: Ideate

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Idealized Design

Rather than thinking of your challenge as trying to address an issue in the current environment, imagine that you are starting anew and can design an ideal system that does not have any of the current problems. Then step back from this and extract concepts and design principles that you can begin to test in the current environment that would approximate the ideal as closely as possible.

Exercise

The aim is to explore a relatively constraint-free environment in order to generate several novel, practical ideas.

Tips

The key to this tool lies in taking existing constraints, physical plant, job roles, staffing levels, etc., off the table. Emphasize repeatedly that this is a new build and we can do whatever we need to do to get it right. There are very few givens. Promise that you will return to deal with current reality in the second half of the tool.

All methods of creative idea generation involve some combination of mental attention, escape and movement. Idealized design provides escape from current reality to a clean slate, asks for mental movement to design an ideal state, calls for attention to the new ideas and concepts that emerge in that process, then asks for mental movement to adapt those concepts back to the current state.