Design operations guide

Divergent and convergent thinking models

The design phase is made up of successive cycles of convergent and divergent thinking. This means that, as you move through the design phase, you will have to flow between thinking generatively, and creatively, and analytically, and reductively. The balance between these thought paradigms characterizes a successful design phase, as both convergent and divergent thinking are necessary to realizing the potential of the opportunity spaces identified in the discovery phase.

Get started with divergent and convergent thinking in the following section as you generate project ideas, then identify constraints.

Divergent thinking

Call it ideation, brainstorming, “thinking outside the box,” or whatever you like — divergent thinking is about exploring what’s possible, and it’s a core practice of most designers. It happens intuitively, when we allow ourselves to wonder, speculate, or ask “what if?”—but it’s also important to do it intentionally throughout your design process.

At this point, you may already have some design ideas in mind. Maybe the strategy, solution, or approach you’re seeking has seemed clear from the start. Or maybe you have some insight into the problem you’re hoping to resolve, but you still aren’t sure how to go about addressing it. In either case, resist the temptation to either fixate on your first ideas or to despair about your lack of ideas. Before you decide to go all-in or give up, you need to make time for divergent thinking and imaginative exploration.

The HCD process has some intentional moments of divergent thinking built in. They generally follow stages of work that require targeted, tight, and focused thinking. Since you’ve just done some tightly focused work defining your project level principles, now is the time to let your thoughts roam free and unhampered.

Cultivating the spirit and space for this kind of divergent thinking may come naturally to you, or it may take some practice, but it will hopefully come to feel like “the fun part” of your process, where you give yourself the freedom to fully exercise your creativity. Use the activities in this section to get started.

Divergent thinking activities

The following activities start as divergent thinking exercises to generate ideas. Then they guide you through a follow-up discussion to help the team understand those ideas and start to converge around a common direction. These activities call for “thinking outside the box,” also known as brainstorming. Let go of any thoughts that keep you in the world of practicalities, constraints, timelines, and budgets. Allow your mind to wander into a world of possibility.

Top Five

“Top Five” is a brainstorming activity that gets the team to articulate their ideas, then rank them for discussion and critique. The directions are written as if the team is co-located, but this activity can also be done remotely over a video call, using a virtual whiteboard.

Materials

• Markers
• Sticky notes
• Colored dots

Directions

1. Idea Generation: The team sets five minutes on a timer. Within this time limit, each person on the team brainstorms—on their own—as many ideas for the design solution as they can. Each person puts each of their ideas on a sticky note. This activity is done silently.
2. Individual Ranking: When five minutes is up, each person reviews their ideas and then chooses their top five.
3. Show the Team: Each person places their top five ideas up on a wall (or virtual whiteboard) for the team to review.
4. Silent Reading: Using a five minute limit, the team silently reads everyone’s ideas.
5. Question Time: Taking no longer than 45 minutes, each person now gets to ask questions. You can allot each person a turn, or you can ask questions in a free-flowing way, allowing whomever feels compelled to speak in the moment to do so. The most valuable questions are those that seek to understand the intention behind each person’s idea.
6. Clustering: As different people’s ideas become more clear, group together any ideas that seem similar. The act of putting similar things into a group is called clustering, and the groups of ideas are called clusters. Agree on a name for each cluster. If some ideas don’t belong to a particular cluster, allow these ideas to stand on their own, as part of your larger canvas of ideas. You can gain insights simply by observing stand-alone ideas in relation to ideas grouped by likeness.
7. Voting: Allow three minutes for each member of the team to take their sticker dots and use them to mark their top five ideas. If you have clusters, use your sticky dot to vote for the cluster as a whole, not the individual ideas that are inside it.
8. Count the Votes: Take the top five ideas and move on to the next activity. If you don’t hit five, that’s okay! But make sure you have more than one idea to move forward with. You’ll test multiple ideas in the field to ensure that you are meeting as many of the participants’ needs as possible.

Concept Mapping

This activity invites you to see a concept within its context. It prompts your team to share important components around a concept and find the connections. It places a concept against the backdrop of a larger ecosystem or landscape. Creating this big picture facilitates more expansive group thinking, problem framing, and solution making.

Materials

• Tabletops or big, empty walls (or a virtual whiteboard)
• Painter’s tape

Directions

1. Unpack the ideas: Look at the first idea that you selected from the previous round. Individually, use your sticky notes to write all the attributes or components of the idea that you can think of. (This is the “unpacking” part.)
2. Show the team: As a group, share your attributes and components by placing them on the tabletop, wall, or virtual whiteboard.
3. Clustering: If there are similar components, cluster them together. Agree on a name for the cluster that describes the attributes or components in that group.
4. Start the map: Begin to organize the components, placing broader, more abstract components toward the middle, and more specific, concrete components toward the edges.
5. Draw the map: Draw lines between related components and attributes.
6. Define the idea’s structure: As you see how the attributes and components are related, write them down or sketch their flow from one to another. Once you have this initial flow of attributes down, you will have an idea for how this idea works or fits together and how it might drive your design process.
7. Repeat this process: Repeat for each of your ideas.

Convergent thinking

After you’ve considered a wide range of possible design ideas through divergent thinking, it’s time to bring your idea—and your mindset—back to the world of constraints and practicalities. Now is when you lasso your ideas out of the big blue sky and tug them back to earth, to see which ideas hold up when confronted with the constraints, curve balls, and imperfections of daily life. By observing how your ideas contend with day-to-day reality, you’ll know which ones are ready for further development.

Like divergent thinking, convergent thinking will happen naturally and intermittently throughout your design process—whenever you prioritize, refine, or select ideas to pursue. Be as conscientious and deliberate as possible when moving into this unique frame of mind and mode of work.

Convergent thinking is decision making. The decisions you’re making may be simple, tactical choices about what to focus on, or how to organize your ideas. These decisions may be significant, strategic conclusions about the direction and outcomes of your work.

There may be tough choices as you pare down, edit out, mix together, pick between, and let go of some ideas in favor of others. There is an expression in the literary world that sometimes you have to “kill your darlings,” which means walking away from ideas you really like if they don’t serve the greater good of your project. For example, you might really, really want to design a game, but, when you look at the participants’ needs and project constraints, a game just won’t answer to both. So you have to walk away from that idea.

Convergent thinking may come to feel like “the hard part” of your design process, but it’s an essential step to transform your intentions into action. Doing this in a group requires careful communication and consensus building.

The framework in this section provides some tools and techniques to help you start identifying your constraints and reality checks, so you can discern which of your design ideas is the most ready and able to meet the real world.