What strategies might students engage in during the ideate phase of the design- thinking process?

- **Brainstorming:** Students can engage in unrestrained idea generation, allowing all thoughts to surface without fear of criticism. The focus is on quantity over quality to encourage a wide range of possibilities, similar to generating solutions for an equation like \( f(x) = \text{all ideas} \). - **Mind Mapping:** Creating visual diagrams that connect different ideas helps students see relationships and spark new insights. This strategy resembles plotting nodes that interconnect, similar to a graph where each node represents a concept. - **"How Might We" Questions:** Framing challenges as open-ended questions (e.g., "How might we improve the user experience?") encourages thinking from various perspectives to generate multiple approaches. - **SCAMPER Technique:** This involves applying a series of prompts to existing ideas using: - **Substitute:** Change parts of the concept. - **Combine:** Merge two or more ideas. - **Adapt:** Adjust the components for a new purpose. - **Modify:** Alter the design or features. - **Put to Another Use:** Consider different applications. - **Eliminate:** Remove unnecessary elements. - **Reverse:** Reorder or invert the structure. Each prompt helps break conventional patterns of thought. - **Sketching and Visual Prototyping:** Drawing quick sketches or creating low-fidelity models allows students to visualize ideas. Conceptual illustrations can be seen as preliminary "models" of potential solutions, much like drafting a preliminary proof before refining it. - **Role Playing and Storytelling:** By acting out scenarios or constructing narratives, students can explore how ideas might function in real-world contexts. This strategy helps in understanding user interactions and emotional responses. - **Divergent Thinking Exercises:** Activities that deliberately push the mind to explore different, non-obvious alternatives beyond mainstream ideas. This can lead to innovative solutions by exploring a broad solution space \( S \) where \( S = \{ \text{diverse, unexpected ideas} \} \). Each of these strategies encourages open-minded exploration, creativity, and a willingness to take risks—core principles during the ideate phase of the design-thinking process.