💡 Creative Process · 6 steps

Ideation: How to Find Great Ideas

Six proven techniques — brainstorming rules, Crazy 8s, SCAMPER, and more — to generate lots of ideas and choose the best one.

Great ideas are rarely lightning bolts. They come from using deliberate techniques that push your brain past its first, obvious answers. This module teaches you the same ideation methods used in real design studios — use your journal at each step to capture what you come up with.

Step 1 of 6

Warm up: quantity beats quality

The single most important rule of ideation: at the start, more ideas beat better ideas.

Research on creative teams shows the best idea usually appears after the obvious ones run out — often past idea #10. If you stop at three ideas, you keep only the ones everyone else would also think of.

So warm up: pick any everyday object (a spoon, a backpack, a chair) and set a 3-minute timer. List every possible use for it — sensible or silly. Don't stop to judge.

📓 Journal prompt: how many uses did you find? Which one made you laugh — and is there something oddly clever about it?

📓 My inventor's journal

Journal prompts in each step help you capture your thinking — log in with your student account to save your answers as you go.