In 2017, I introduced to my blog readers the design thinking process (aka human-centered design), a process many nonprofits and community groups use to generate engagement with communities.

The first step in the design thinking process is to Empathize: Learn about your audience or community through interviews and observations to answer the question “What do they need?”. This creates our User Persona.

The second step is to Define: Identify the problem you want to solve, based on your User Persona.

When we fall into the habit of thinking we know what the problem is, we end up creating unsuccessful programs, services, and strategies because the voices of the people we want to reach aren’t involved in the process. This is why the first two steps in the design thinking process are crucial. In order to create the right solution, we need to identify the right problem is from our User Persona’s perspective.

Now that we’ve done steps one and two, let’s move on to the third step in the design thinking process: Ideate.

When we last left off, we walked our User Persona through The Journey Map to discover what issues may arise in getting buy-in to create an awareness campaign that teaches formally incarcerated women about the Reproductive Justice framework and teaches advocacy skills to help formally incarcerated women advocate for accessible reproductive healthcare, both during incarceration and during the transition process.

Here’s our User Persona:

In her Journey Map, our User Persona outlines the steps she thinks are needed to generate buy-in with her staff:

She identified potential pain points…

…and identified potential solutions.

Using the pain points and potential solutions, let’s do some ideation.

In the Ideation stage in the design thinking process, the goal is to generate a large number of ideas — which hopefully lead to newer and better ideas — that the User Persona can narrow down into the most innovative and most practical ones.

In a nutshell, the Ideation stage helps you to:

  •  Ask the right questions
  • Go beyond what may be considered an obvious solution to help us think more creatively
  • Bring together varying perspectives

In the case of our User Persona, the problem is that the staff varied in their understanding of Reproductive Justice, which led to their lack of buy-in, and the solution our User Persona identified was to develop a Reproductive Justice 101 training. With this, we’re hoping it leads to high buy-in in the development of this program to be implemented to our participants.

Our task now is to come up with ideas that will help our staff learn more about the Reproductive Justice framework and how it can tie into their work and into the development of our RJ campaign for our participants.

So, how do we ideate? Here are some sample processes to choose from based on activities I’ve previosuly written about:

Choose whichever one works best for you. Now, let’s look at our ideas through another activity called the Four Categories.

In the Four Categories process, we take our ideas from the Define process and rate them from most rational choices to the ‘long shot’ choices. The four categories are: the rational choice, the most likely to delight, the ideal/darling, and the long shot.

Since we have the buy-in from our executive director, invite them to join this process. Take the ideas from your ideation activity with the exectuve director and arrange them under the designated category. This method ensures that all ideas are covered, from most the practical to ideas that may seem the more innovative.

Key Takeaway

Ideation is considered the best part of the design thinking process because it allows you to think about what can typically be done to what could possibly be. Generate as many ideas–both practical and innovative– and narrow them down based on the context you’re in. Another exciting part of the Ideation process? There are a variety of creative ways to generate ideas.

Raise Your Voice: Have you tried this activity before? Share below in the comments section.