Design: Generating Creative Ideos

David Kelley thinks everyone is creative, at least until the creativity is driven out. He teaches a course in creativity at Stanford University in the heart of the most famously creative city in the most creative industry in the most creative country. Peter Robinson interviews him on Uncommon Knowledge.

Kelley's 5 steps in the creative process (The video gives more detail at 12 minutes.)

1. Empathize – bias for action: immerse yourself in the situation to be studied and see it from the typical user's perspective.
2. Define – Explicitly define the problem to be solved, then iteratively re-define at as your project progresses.
3. Ideate – with fluency and flexibility. Fluency says the way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and flexibility says make them different from one another. Find your ideas from talking to users and experts, looking at other ideas and at the state-of-the-art.
4. Prototype – make something physical that lets people experience your idea.
5. Test – Put your prototype in front of your ultimate judges and see what they think. Take their suggestions and make it better.

More details in his book, his free 80-minute course or his YouTube videos.