Creativity for Web Developers, Continued

All the research and observation you've done up until this point is about to pay off in ideas -- some good, some bad, some hopefully spectacular. "Generating" ideas sounds a bit mechanistic, but it's a good term for what happens in this stage. According to creativity experts such as Alex Osborn (who is credited with coming up with the concept of "brainstorming"), your focus should be on quantity of ideas, not quality of ideas. Your goal for this stage should be to generate as many possible solutions as you can, suspending judgment until you have finished. Anything goes, and there are no "bad" ideas during this part of the process.

A typical brainstorming session usually features about half a dozen people in a room with a white board or large notepad. (If you work alone, try pulling in users, the client, even friends or acquaintances.) It helps to brainstorm away from your everyday work environment, and it's essential that everyone is comfortable and relaxed. If you are running the session, you'll need to lay down a few simple ground rules before you begin:

• Keep an open mind. Suspend judgment until the evaluation stage.
• Avoid "satisficing," or settling on the first solution that comes to mind.
• Be confident and unafraid to speak your mind. Anything goes.
• Aim for quantity of ideas, not quality.
• Extend and expand on the ideas of others.

This last ground rule is part of what makes brainstorming work. Brainstorming is a collective activity, and it often yields creative solutions because many minds are at work on a problem. The more perspectives, the better. One participant might come up with a clever concept, but it might be another participant's extension of that concept that provides the ideal solution.

A theorist named Robert Eberle devised a system to facilitate this collaborative expansion of ideas. Its acronyn is "SCAMPER," which stands for:

Substitute
    Replace one concept or component with another.

Combine
    Group ideas together to form new ones.

Adapt
    Alter an existing idea to suit your purposes.

Magnify/Minimize/Modify
    Shrink or expand an idea or service to create a new one.

Put to other uses
    Brainstorm a different purpose than originally intended.

Eliminate
    Delete a concept or component.

Reverse/Rearrange
    Look at things upside down and backwards, or change the order.

For example, if you're a search site looking for a new twist, you might consider magnifying your service and becoming a one-stop launchpad for user's interests, or minimizing into a search box that could be easily integrated into the browser. If you're a company that runs a gardening magazine and a separate seeds division, you might decide to combine these projects into a gardening commerce site.

As you generate and expand on ideas, use tools that will support creative thinking. It's cumbersome to play with possibilities in code, for example, because changes are time-consuming. Instead, use a sketchpad or white board to play with ideas well before you hard code them.

Using methods such as SCAMPER to expand on concepts, you should be able to generate a web of interrelated ideas. Some of these will be destined for greatness and others will be destined for the scrap pile. You'll make these judgments in the evaluation stage, which comes next.

Managing Creatively: Putting Ideas to Work for You
A survey of creativity theories and practices.

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