Beyond creating lists of new ideas and concepts, brainstorm graphic organizers help in the creation of new knowledge by visually structuring a deep dive into a problem space.
Brainstorming has traditionally been used to spur group creativity with the intention of generating concepts and ideas regarding a specific challenge. “Go for quantity over quality,” “withhold judgment and criticism,” “build on each other’s ideas,” and “welcome oddity” are a few of the widely accepted rules of brainstorming.1 The intention of these guidelines is to create a safe forum for the expression and freeassociation of creative ideas, and quell any inhibitions of the participants by providing a judgment-free zone to explore new concepts.
More recently, brainstorming is also being used to develop one’s fluency of thinking.2 Graphic organizers, or visual representations of knowledge, are frameworks that facilitate teams as they challenge assumptions, experiment with new relationships between accepted components of a problem space, and as they consider unconventional alternatives within a domain.
Design teams can visually communicate the rigor required of most brainstorming sessions using the following visualization frameworks: 3