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Create a Concept

Move from a handful of ideas and insights into a fully-fledged concept, one that you’ll refine and push forward.

Stats

Suggested Time

60-90 Minutes

Level of Difficulty

Hard

Materials Needed

Pens, Post-its, paper

Participants

Design team


Process Phase

So far you’ve come up with, shared, and even discarded scores of ideas. You further refined things as you Bundled Your Ideas and now it’s time to turn them into a Concept. A Concept is more polished and complete than an idea. It’s more sophisticated, it’s something that you’ll want to test with the people you’re designing for, and it’s starting to look like an answer to your How Might We question. This is the moment where you move from problem to solution and it drives everything that comes next.

Steps

  1. Take the ideas that you bundled in Bundle Your Ideas and put them up in the wall on Post-its.
  2. Now might be a good time to Create Frameworks out of those Bundled Ideas. Start to visualize where your Bundles are pointing, but think especially hard about making them into a system.
  3. Don’t worry too much about all the details of your solution now—you don’t need a finely tuned funding strategy just yet. The goal is to get a robust, flexible Concept that addresses the problem you’re trying to solve.
  4. Keep referring back to your How Might We question. Are you answering it? Are there elements missing in your solution? What else can you incorporate to come up with a great solution?
  5. Like the rest of human-centered design, there’s a bit of trial and error here. And Creating a Concept means you’ll probably create a couple that don’t work out. That’s fine. As you move into Rapid Prototyping you will begin to narrow down.

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