In late November 2020, I had the opportunity to go back to the Academic world and talk about BrainStorming in the Applied Design Thinking process in Business Innovation Studies class at Inholland University of Applied Sciences with 60 students and facilitate a mini-workshop around this topic.
The talk started by explaining “what is BrainStorming” and continued with “How to Brainstorm.” Some topics covered in the How to section broke down into four categories:
- Before the session
- During the session
- After the session
- DeadEnds in the session
At the end, three BrainStorm techniques were introduced:
- Silent Group
- Hot Potato
- Six Thinking Hats
to help the students familiarize with different kind of methods used in different circumstances.
After the talk, I facilitated a mini-workshop using the “Figurative Storming” technique. Since the pandemic made most education part online, this method would have helped the students come out of their comfort zone and think out of the box, even used individually and independently.
The steps in the workshop were followed as below:
Ideation
Clustering
Group Discussion
