Ideation

Lottery game

An fun ideation exercise that encourages to think out-of-the box and to come up with as many ideas as possible. There is no judgement or criticism in this process – every idea is valid. By creating a large amount of ideas, you boost the creative and ideation mindset of your team. Even though the ideas might not be feasible, the exercise emphasises out-of-the-box thinking that can trigger new ways of looking at the social issue you are trying to solve.

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Format Game, Method, WorkshopTimeframe < 1hGroup Size AllFacilitation Level LowRequired Materials Pen and paper, Post its

Steps

  • Write down a few (2-4) topics or themes that are related to your project. 
  • For each topic, write down a few 1) stakeholders 2) locations and 3) actions or activities. For example: A topic you wrote down was ‘information campaign’. On the first pieces of paper, write down stakeholders for the campaign (e.g., farmers, families, journalist). On the second piece of paper write down locations for the campaign (e.g. online, on the street, on the radio). On the last piece of paper, write down the actions or activities of the campaign (e.g. creating a message, informing communities, change perceptions).
  • Now you randomly choose one word from each category (one stakeholder, one location and one action/activity). Combine these three words to come up with as many new ideas to solve your design challenge using these 3 words. Record these new idea combinations in the form of a short sentence, one idea per post it.
  • Repeat the exercise at least three times with new combinations of ideas from the 3 categories.

Benefits

Generating many creative and fresh ideas.

Tips

If you do this exercise with people who can’t read due to illiteracy or visual impairments, assign one note taker, who narrates the activity, reads out the ideas and notes them down. You can also use illustration instead of words as shown in the photo. The ideas that were generated with this tool are the starting point to come up with a creative solution for your design challenge. You need to select the ones that are the most promising or take out elements that can be used.
Download Tool Supporting Files