I personally love ideating ideas, I love convergent and divergent thinking methods from frameworks like the British Design Council Double Diamond or even more specific practices like Crazy 8's that help explore ideas quickly.
A colleague at work wrote some amazing notes recently from a Pixar presentation on innovation. One of the key concepts that stuck out to me was an idea that instead of being negative towards ideas and shooting them down by saying "No because", we should approach them by saying "Yes and". This idea reminded me of similar advice that Tom Kelly, IDEO's founder gave inThe Ten Faces of Innovation. He argued that you should never play the devil's advocate and shoot down ideas before they are given a chance. He argues the best idea will always rise to the top.
So when I read "Yes and". It struck me. I thought we could use this in product design. This is what Tom Kelly was talking about but in a much better form. The framework I imagined takes an idea and expands it out using divergent thinking. It's based loosely on the 5 whys but the opposite of it.
The context for how I use this method is at the early stages of the design process. I do this work on a sketch pad or on the iPad. It's very rough and sketchy, just for me. If you are more into group thinking, there is no reason why you couldn't take this and turn it into a workshop with some teammates.
A natural starting point for me is to write down the idea I want to start from. I call this the center. For a recent experiment, we ran that won, I wanted to iterate upon this idea to see where else we could take it. The center for this piece was "Hide out of stock products".
One line of exploration I thought of was the ability to filter products on the site by other forms of product status. Taking the center and saying Yes and to each of the other product statuses I could think of. I jotted them down and linked them back to the center.
Now the fun beings, I methodically explored each of the new ideas using the same method. Digging deeper and deeper to expand the original idea until its ideas became exhausted or intangible. When they do, I jump back up the tree of ideas to where I can jump in again and explore another avenue.
What I tend to find at the end of this exercise is a tone of raw ideas. Probably too many, and likely, a lot of bad ideas. I'm also likely a little lost at this point and need some direction. This is a great point to bring in the team to vet the ideas. Before I do that I would normally push my ideas through some sort of editing processes like the Direct and Indirect iteration process or our design principles.
