Hey everyone! I’m a fourth-year design student developing a card-based toolkit that helps designers spark new ideas and explore creative thinking from different perspectives.
I’m running a short survey to learn how people approach design prompts, constraints, and brainstorming. While it’s especially aimed at early-year design students, I’d love to hear from experienced designers as well — your insights will help shape how accessible and useful this toolkit becomes.
It only takes a few minutes, and your answers will directly inform the final design of the cards and workshop format.
I’m sorry, but I got most of the way through the survey before giving up. Your definition of brainstorming seems different from mine. I think of brainstorming as a group of people getting together and tossing around random ideas in the hopes of generating workable ideas. Your questions seem based on a different definition.
You use the term “design prompts” in the survey. What is a design prompt?
By the way, at least one of the questions (I can’t remember which) permits multiple answers, yet the survey form uses radio buttons that do not allow this. You need checkboxes to enable multiple answers.
Have you come across Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s ‘Oblique Strategies?’ this was a 1975 creative ideation aid - mostly for music but might be worth investigating
Hi! Thank you for taking a look at the survey. Could you describe what you found confusing? There is no actual definition of brainstorming listed in the survey, so it is up to the individual’s interpretations. Although we as designers do work well in groups, there are instances where we do need to work alone or map out our process. This is what is meant by brainstorming, or, to be more exact, the way you approach your design process!
Additionally, I did check the survey. There are no questions that had bullets where checkpoints were needed, but I changed some of them anyways.
For what it’s worth (on the off chance you’re unfamiliar with the specs), radio buttons are for a single, mutually exclusive choice, while checkboxes allow for multiple independent selections within the group. This is a WHATWG and W3C HTML specification, not a convention. The Google Forms you used to build the survey comply with the W3C specs.
This is a tangent, but here’s a link to a 2012 New York Times article on (group) brainstorming. If anyone is interested and hits their paywall, you can download the PDF.
My first few jobs as a designer were at ad agencies and design studios. I regarded their brainstorming sessions as a waste of time that inevitably produced mediocre ideas.
When I became a creative and marketing director, I eliminated brainstorming sessions as a regular part of the process. This irked some of the aggressive account executives and managers who saw those sessions as opportunities to push their awful ideas onto the more introverted creative team, whose most creative members came up with their best ideas when working alone or in small groups.
I still wanted to hear what the account managers had to say, of course, because they interacted directly with the clients more than I did. I just saw no reason to waste time and money assembling a crowd to listen to them and others throw crap at the wall in the hope that something would stick.
The NY Times article crystallized everything I had ever thought about brainstorming and group thinking.
