Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer’s Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous

Idea generation

Now that we’ve identified moments of opportunity, it’s time to think about how they might be addressed. To generate ideas we need to think about different styles of thinking. What we’re looking for at this point is divergent thinking, a concept attributed to the psychologist J. P. Guilford in the 1950s. In his description of divergent thinking he talks about four characteristics:

• Fluency, the ability to rapidly produce lots of ideas.

• Flexibility, the ability to consider different approaches and different options.

• Originality, the ability to think differently about a problem.

• Elaboration, the ability to think through the details of the idea and take it to the next step.

The converse of divergent thinking is convergent thinking, ...