PSI Problem - Solution - Idea	635 Close up of a completed sheet	635 All the completed 635 documents from the day of idea generation.
Crawford Slip Discussing the ideas produced, and selecting them into categories	Group Work	Final list of ideas A section of the list of the ideas created from the idea generation process

6-3-5

The 6-3-5 method is a kind of brainstorming, but adds more structure. A group of 6 people will write down 3 ideas in 5 minutes. After that everybody passes on his/her sheet to his/her neighbour, and the neighbouring designer will either add new aspects to the original concept, develop them further, or add a new concept of their own. Once the whole process has been completed they should have a wide range of developed concepts.

My group for the ideation process was large compared to others, consisting of 7 members. In an ideation environment it’s vital to have a “never say no” attitude to all ideas, our group replicated this helping to come up with some really extraordinary ideas, and found this process to be very successful in producing a wide range of wacky, unique, and out the box ideas. This could have been mainly down to the fact none of the members had sporting backgrounds, this allowed for some real out the box thinking for ways to get around the problem e.g. changing the pitch surface.

The exercise was carried out through a whole day. I found this hampered the process as people quickly became exhausted of ideas. In future, if I was to do this again I would defiantly try and spread it out more catching people in different moods, thus altering the types of idea’s they would come up with. Overall I found this technique came up with the largest amount of feasible ideas.

PSI

Problem + Stimulus = Idea. Simple, but effective way of coming up with unique ideas that use an irrelevant stimuli to your problem. The stimulus can be anything that is located around them, and are infinite, if a stimulus doesn’t produce any ideas in a couple of minutes then simply move on to another stimulus. For example, thinking about their problem and looking out the window they could use stimulus such as a cloud to produce an idea. This technique applies the principle of forced association, which is why it’s useful for when a designer feels their ideas are drying up.

I used this particular technique after my 635. This technique forced me to use obscure stimulus to create out of the box ideas for the problem. This was particularly useful after the 635 technique as the ideas had started to become rather repetitive, and stale. The technique was also an individual one, meaning I could do it as often as possible in my own time. The range of ideas wasn’t as high as the 635, but more densely populated with interesting concepts.

Crawfords Slip

This technique of ideation is only applicable when in a group situation, and quickly amasses a large range of ideas. In this method of ideation one member of the group will state his/her problem to the rest of the group, once he/she has explained their problem to the group they will right down the first solution that comes to mind. The members of the group are left for a minute to come up with as many ideas as possible. They then quickly read through the problems as a group deciding, which ones have any feasibility in them, and could be taken forward.

Personally I found this generation technique simply an inferior version of the 635, although much quicker to carry out. Being in a particularly large group for my ideation process it produced a nice number of ideas. The Crawford slip method was the last technique we carried out as a group, and I felt that the ideas had dried up, as members of the group would repeat ideas from early methods, or just slight variations of ideas already sounded out in the two other techniques. If I had carried out this process at the start it may have thrown up more interesting ideas, and ones that immediately jumped to the foreground of other group member’s minds.

After cancelling out repetitions of this ideation generation process, I had a total 77 concepts to take forward into my analysis.