“Research has estimated that nearly 70% of a product’s lifecycle cost will be determined during the conceptual design phase. Therefore, there is clearly a benefit to tools that help designers develop better and more innovative solution concepts during design.”
This site contains an evolving collection of analog (non-digital) tools for creativity, innovation, ideation, conceptualization, empathy, discovery, exploration and other aspects of the "fuzzy front-end" or early stages of design.
The intention is to make the impressive diversity of carefully crafted tools more readily accessible, searchable and selectable for practicing designers.
The initial set of 76 tools were identified as part of an academic review of analog ideation tools:
Peters D, Loke L, & Ahmadpour N (2020) “Toolkits, Cards and Games – A Review of Analogue Tools for Collaborative Ideation.” [Download PDF]
Key
As part of the academic review, 10 descriptors and 7 tool content-types were identified. These are used as labels on this site and each is described below. Specifically, we found that tools could be described as being of one or more of the following types:Content types
- Methods – Many tools are essentially collections of design methods or creativity strategies (i.e. a methods card deck).
- Prompts – Many tools include provocative questions, triggers or abstract visuals to prompt divergent thinking.
- Components – A number of tools include placeholders (cards, tiles or pawns) to represent different components within a system or of a problem (i.e. users, stakeholders, government, technologies, etc.) allowing these to be externalised, reorganised and kept salient during collaboration.
- Concepts – Some tools present chunks of expert knowledge in a manageable manipulable form (e.g. short descriptions of psychological theory on individual cards). This makes the knowledge easier to learn, share and represent externally.
- Stories – A few tools incorporate narratives as part of their approach. For example, a story to illustrate the use of a strategy or as a prompt.
- Embodiment – One tool surveyed incorporates analogue simulation of embodied experience. This was the Cambridge Inclusive Design Toolkit which contains both glasses and gloves to allow designers to directly experience reduced visual and manual ability.
- Construction – One tool surveyed (LEGO Serious Play) comprises construction pieces for co-creation of physical 3D artefacts.