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Create Insight Statements

A critical piece of the Ideation phase is plucking the insights that will drive your design out of the huge body of information you’ve gathered.

Stats

Suggested Time

60 Minutes

Level of Difficulty

Hard

Materials Needed

Pens, paper, your work from Find Themes

Participants

Design team


Process Phase

Insight Statements succinctly articulate the most valuable learning or "aha" moments that emerge from your research. After you’ve downloaded findings and identified key themes from your research, creating insight statements will help point the way forward. Your insight statements will help you frame How Might We questions and give shape and form to subsequent Brainstorm. It’s not always easy to create them, and it will probably take some work editing them down to the three to five main insights that will help you drive toward solutions.

Steps

  1. Take the themes that you identified in the Find Themes activity and put them up on a wall or board.
  2. Take one of the themes and rephrase it as a short statement. You’re not looking for a solution here, merely transforming a theme into what feels like a core insight of your research. Use the Insights Checklist worksheet to help build a strong insight statement.
  3. Once you’ve done this for all the themes, it’s time to prioritize your insights. Look back at your original Design Challenge and the key outcome goal(s) defined, as well as the important ecosystem shifts and constraints that you captured. Sift through your insight statements and discard any that don’t directly relate to your challenge. Reflect also on whether you have any gaps and revisit your themes if you need. You should end up with 3 to 5 insight statements.
  4. Take a final pass at refining your insights, using your checklist again. Make sure that they convey the sense of a new perspective or possibility. Consider inviting someone who is not part of your team to read your insight statements and see how they resonate.
  5. Your insights will play an important role in shaping your prototypes as well as the rest of your design process. From here you’ll use them to frame How Might We questions and you’ll come back to them again when you are Determining What To Prototype.
Download Worksheet

Methods in Action

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Method in Action
Create Insight Statements

by Ravi Prakash

Water & Sanitation

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