BrainstormingBrainstormingOsborne, A. F. (1963), Applied Imagination, Schribener and Sons, NY.
Brainstorming is one of several group approaches, probably the oldest and best known. The idea is to let people come together and inspire each other in the creative, idea generation phase of the problem solving process. It is used to generate new ideas by freeing the mind to accept any idea that is suggested, thus allowing freedom for creativity. The approach has been widely used in design. Brainstorming is used at an early stage in the elicitation process for the rapid generation of ideas and problems in a specific domain, and is focused on the quantity of the response. Clustering methods may be used to enhance the outcome of a group session.
Early in the development phase when little of the actual design is known, and there is a need for new ideas.
The group process as such is usually perceived as rewarding in itself, and it creates a feeling of ownership of the result. In the brainstorming process everybody in the group can take credit for the good ideas. Also when any experts are present, it has the advantage of preventing early criticism of ideas and reduces negative evaluative comments at an early stage of system development.
There has been a wide range of studies intended to evaluate the efficiency of the approach, and the majority of these studies shows that people working in isolation produce more and better ideas than when working as a group.
The human resources are the most important for succeeding with this approach. The more creative people with a variety of experiences in the field, the better the result. 5 - 12 people may participate, and the session need not take more than one hour.
This is not a proprietary approach.
Very relevant, however, new developments making use of creative drawing techniques should also be considered when designing graphical and multi-media interfaces. See for instance Verplank (1991).
Verplank, W. (1991), Graphical Invention for User Interfaces,Tutorial, ACM CHI’91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1991.