My Project for Course: Creative Thinking 101: Generate Groundbreaking Ideas

I worked on the Neuromotion Dancing Shoes brief shared by the course instructor Mr. Nick Eagleton. This project features all the major slides generated (progressively) while covering different sections of the course.

U2: Getting Ready

I started by selecting the tools for the ideation sessions: Miro Board and Dictionary / Thesaurus App of Mac OS, and three things that inspire me: Landscape photographs of legendary photographer Ansel Adams, Indian Street Art and Star Trek (The Next Generation) TV series:

I then did two Get in the Right Mindset exercises:
a) Sorry, No. Yes and..
b) Finding alternate uses for an old camera

I then distilled Neuromotion Dancing Shoes brief into a one-liner: Enjoy the Freedom of Dancing keeping the differently-abled / disabled in mind as the main target audience. My backup one liner was: Dance with Confidence for shy teenagers / people as the target audience.

U3: Having Ideas

First Thoughts: My first intense burst of activity / first thoughts were around the one-liner, followed by relationship to four human senses.

Making Connections: I took a big brand (McDonald's) and jotted down some of its associations, then tried to connect them (in green colour) to the one-liner. In the second step, I tried to connect the one liner to my three sources of inspiration.

Filtering Ideas: I chose the best ideas from the brainstorming exercises and grouped them together. In the next stage, shortlisted 6 notes.

Pushing the Ideas: I used the Simplify, Magnify and Beautify technique which certainly gave me a lot of clarity! Selected one option for each and discarded the rest. At this stage, I started seeing a direction emerging for the product pitch.

U4: Sharing Ideas

Refining Ideas: I first did a product naming exercise and the name — Ten Forward (shoes) — emerged from one of my sources of inspiration (Star Trek)! The look and feel also came from another source of inspiration (landscape photographs of Ansel Adams)!

Preparing the Story: Thought of the Who, Why, What and How, and the pitch.

The Pitch: Worked on the pitch in the form of 6 slides, as follows:
(Note: photo credits are given on each slide. 'Star Trek' and 'Ten Forward' names and image of spaceship used under Fair Usage terms)

Application: Created a Press Ad mockup complete with a product name logo, imagery and tagline (in this case also the headline):

Thoroughly enjoyed the course. Many thanks to Mr. Nick Eagleton and the Domestika team.