Deliberately producing many different possible answers to one design problem before judging any of them.
Divergent thinking is the deliberate production of many different answers to one problem before judging any of them.
What makes it work is separating generating from judging, because both happen in the same head and the judging one is louder.
Set a target and a timer, since 20 thumbnail sketches in 20 minutes finds more than three careful drawings ever will.
Bad ideas are useful fuel, so the fold flat chair that would collapse under anyone still hands you a folding mechanism worth keeping.
What Counts As A Range Of Ideas
A range means ideas that differ in form, material, mechanism or user interaction, not in colour or trim.
Ask of any two ideas whether they would need different tools, different materials or a different set of making steps.
If the answer is no, you have one idea drawn twice.
Brainstorming And Mind Maps Get It Out Of Your Head
Brainstorming runs on one rule, which is to write everything, judge nothing, and keep going past the point where it feels finished.
The first 10 ideas are the obvious ones everybody produces, and the useful ones usually turn up between 15 and 30.
A mind map puts the design problem in the centre and branches out into function, user, material, power, place of use and cost.
Branches force coverage, so you notice you have 12 ideas about shape and none about how the thing switches on.
Work in pencil or on sticky notes, because moving and regrouping should cost you nothing.
Photograph the messy original page and put it in your folder, since a neat retyped list is not evidence of process.
Tip
Brainstorm with two or three classmates for the first 10 minutes, then split up and carry on alone.
Groups produce more starting points, while individuals push further from the obvious.
SCAMPER Forces The Idea You Would Not Have Had
SCAMPER is seven prompts applied to an existing product to knock it out of its usual shape.
Substitute swaps a material or part, so a steel bike basket becomes recycled HDPE sheet.
Combine merges two products, so the pencil case is also the stand that props up the tablet.
Adapt borrows a mechanism from elsewhere, so a camera tripod leg becomes the telescopic stem of a lamp.
Modify changes scale or shape, so the same desk tidy at 40 per cent size clips onto a bag strap.
Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse finish the set, so remove the base entirely and hang the whole thing from the shelf above.
SCAMPER earns its keep when you are stuck at idea 12 and everything new looks like idea 3.
Common Mistake
Mind maps and SCAMPER sheets only count as evidence if the pages go into your design folder.
Three tidy final sketches with no working pages behind them give a moderator nothing to credit for idea generation.
Morphological Analysis Builds Combinations By Brute Force
Morphological analysis breaks the product into its functions, lists options for each function, then combines across the lists.
For a desk lamp the functions might be power source, body material, arm movement, switch type and base fixing.
List four options under each, so mains, USB, AA battery and solar sit under power, while steel, plywood, PLA and cardboard tube sit under body.
Four options across five functions gives 1024 possible combinations, which is more starting points than you will ever need.
Pick combinations at random rather than sensibly, because the odd pairings are the ones worth sketching.
Cross out any combination that breaks a specification point, and you have narrowed by evidence rather than by taste.
Example
Solar, cardboard tube, fixed arm, touch switch, clamp base gives a lamp for a classroom window ledge.
USB, plywood, folding arm, rocker switch, weighted base gives a lamp for a boarding house desk.
Same five functions, two products that share almost nothing.
Mood Boards Fix The Look Before The Sketch
A mood board is a single page of images, colours, textures and typefaces that fixes the visual direction your client wants.
Build it from real sources, such as photographs of the room the product will live in, products your client already owns, and a strip of material samples.
Pull specific values off it, such as a hex code, a named finish or a 6 mm corner radius, so it feeds your specification instead of decorating your folder.
Show the board to your client and record which three images they react to and what they say about each.
A mood board generates no mechanisms, so it sits alongside brainstorming rather than replacing it.
Activity
Collect 12 images for your mood board, then delete the six that only show products like the one you already want to make.
Replace them with images from outside your product type, such as architecture, packaging or plants.
Write down one feature you could borrow from each new image.
Three Near Identical Ideas Score Badly
Criterion B asks for a range of feasible design ideas, and three variations of one concept read as one idea with two spare drawings.
The usual cause is committing early, so you sketch your favourite and then draw two weaker versions of it to fill the page.
The giveaway is that the alternatives share the same material, the same mechanism and the same proportions.
Aim for three or four ideas a stranger could describe in different words without mentioning colour.
Feasible matters as much as different, so an idea needing a 5 axis CNC machine you cannot book is not a real option.
Keep every rejected sketch in the folder, because those pages are the proof that you generated a range at all.
Active recall
Why does divergent thinking insist on separating generating from judging?
What four things must differ before two ideas count as genuinely different?
Apply any three SCAMPER prompts to a school water bottle.
How does morphological analysis produce combinations you would not have thought of?
Why should the rejected sketches stay in your design folder?