SIBO G. DESIGN TIPS – Please hold, creativity loading

Author: Klemen Rehberger, August 2020

 

Although expertise and professionalism are our priorities, creativity is not far behind. Situations requiring at least a spark of creativity are part of our everyday life.

When developing new ideas or solving different dilemmas, we use the following creative thinking techniques:

• Technique W – the essence of this technique is to ask short question words: What (Ger. Was?), Why? (Ger. Warum?), How? (Ger. Wie?) etc. It’s a bit like interviewing ourselves, or even better, the questions small children ask. When answering these questions, our view changes. This technique is frequently used when engineers work independently.
• Brainstorming – a technique where the creative ideas of people with different abilities and experience are gathered in a relatively short time. In our company, it is often used when developing new tools or facing challenges.
• Concept Map – a technique that helps with the visualization of the links between concepts and ideas. It helps to organise our thoughts and discovers new relationships between concepts and ideas. It is mostly used when starting a new project.

Occasionally, other techniques are used too, for example SCAMPER and mind mapping.

But of all of these, we most often use brainstorming. At our company, brainstorming is not just one of the general techniques: it is an important part of the process for each project we work on. We use brainstorming in internal as well as external communication, to generate new concepts or solve engineering challenges. Our main goal is to obtain as many constructive proposals and ideas as possible, in the shortest possible time.

Our brainstorming process is very informal. It can be carried out in a larger group in meetings, or among a few engineers behind desks. It often involves several quick meetings and interactions taking place over a longer period. Quick meetings allow us to think about several ideas during our work and then spontaneously present new ideas or merely extend the previous ones.

The brainstorming process is consistently built on and improved, and its success is evaluated based on the end results.