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Day 2: May Inspiration Find You Working — with Pen and Paper in Hand
27 de May de 2021
Great creators —artists like writers, musicians, painters and so many others— work with raw ideas that are the exclusive product of their imagination. But, when the time comes, they know how to materialise it, creating a particular verse, a colour shade or that precise note that they’ve heard before in their head. “May inspiration find you working”, Picasso used to say. And who greater than him?
That’s the attitude that we look for on the second day of a Design Sprint. If, during Day 1, imagination ruled the day —dreaming about filling the empty spaces of the world of the future with a company that was born in our heads—, Day 2 calls for action —sketching, designing, drawing—. From the get-go and individually, every member of the group must look for the best solutions for the problems at hand in order to share, debate and choose between the different proposed models.
At EAE’s Design Sprint, this phase consisted of 5 steps:
1 - Looking for the Spark and Catching It.
Just like electric sparks, ideas ignite one another. A team is the sum of its parts plus the added value of that sum. Everyone brings something to the table. Eight eyes see better than two and four heads working at full potential feed each other. But, besides ourselves and our own heads, there are people that have thought and faced similar problems before us. That’s why Day 2 starts off with “Lighting Demos”: a search for external inspiration. In order to achieve this, we go through the work that has already been carried out by companies of other sectors. Individually, we look for external inspiration and we analyse their problems and their way of solving them. What can we learn from them?
2 - Ideas with no Breaks.
Inspiration always gives place to ideation. Therefore, the second step of Day 2 is “Note Taking”. After having organised the information gathered during the collective inspiration process and having analysed the challenges that our User Persona faces, we start with one of the most thrilling phases: ideation — raw materialisation and sketching of ideas.
Now comes the blank page — the rack of every writer... but also their best partner. In the middle of the brainstorming process, we write, without fear, every single idea that comes to our mind. We can only use words. Words that, once materialised with pen and paper in hand —yeah, we went analogue here—, will expand our way of seeing things and prepare us to share our concepts.
In this step, Patricia Gallego Chacón —Master in Customer Experience & Innovation student and a participant of EAE’s Design Sprint— was able to gather and organise all the material and information from the previous session and have a clearer view of the group’s ideas: “In broad terms, we were all going in the same direction, but with slight nuances that we polished in the following phases”.
3 - Get the Creative Juice Flowing.
From writing, we move on to drawing. Our idea needs to take a well defined shape. It’s crucial to visualise things in order to feel that they are, indeed, real. Not all of us have the ability to transform the ideas in our head into straight and curved lines. But it’s not about skills — it’s about attitude. We must pour our ideas into paper, regardless of the quality of the image we produce.
An intangible concept then becomes something like a script or, even better, a storyboard. Now, we finally visualise the products, services, channels, processes and even the way in which our client takes on that which we hand over. Imagination is fundamental in order to move our ideas from words to images in an understandable way. You don’t need to be Picasso. You only need to break the taboo — just create.
4 - Coming Up with Ideas for Functionalities.
Searching for further inspiration, we go through all the drawings from the previous step until we find the idea (functionality) that will better suit our needs. Once we find it, we go back and draw that idea. Only that, this time, we draw it 8 times — each time different from the previous one.
This is what we know as the “Crazy 8s”. It allows us to have 8 prototypes of the same idea. Starting from the goal we set on the first day, we add perspectives, we enrich the whole. “At this point, inspiration had taken over us”, Patricia adds.
5 - A Step Closer to Having Our Idea Become a Reality.
“Ideas don’t last long. We must do something with them”, Nobel Prize, Santiago Ramón y Cajal used to say. And, now, we already have them — both in words and in black on white drawings. But, in order for the storytelling to gain depth, we must go further on, one last step in the ideation process that brings together all the various inspirations.
Three dashboards serve as a guide to complete the work of Day 2:
- Start: How will we communicate our idea to our consumer?
- Middle: How will the consumer find out what’s our idea?
- Final: How will our consumer make use of our idea? How will they complement the goal we seek to achieve with it?
“The ideation process is a beautiful part of the design process that allows you to create, have fun and —why not?— play”, Patricia concludes. In the end, an idea alone, with no design to back it up or a way to carry it out —even if it’s a simple sketch— becomes an unshareable element and, therefore, impossible to put into practice. The way in which we express it towards ourselves and others is as important as the idea itself.
Article wrote in collaboration with
Santiago Tobón Tobón - EAE Entrepreneur
Patricia Gallego Chacón - Master in Customer Experience & Innovation Student