11 Ideas to Spark Design Creativity

What sparks your design creativity? It’s an interesting question with answers that are as varied as the way you approach design problems.

Recently, the E-Learning Guild polled dozens of leading eLearning designers to find out how they approach the creative conundrum.

My Learning Space culled through the list of ideas and came up with a number of them we thought you’d be interested in, or may not have considered.

1.  Force yourself out of your comfort zone.  If you use video or audio for compliance training, for example, try to design the course without those elements.
2. Look to family and friends for inspiration.  Observe your nieces or nephews at play and see how they approach problems from a solutions or gaming perspective.
3. Read and travel.  Asking others what they are reading can open up new ways of looking at the world through different perspectives.  Travel by its very nature forces you to adapt to new and unusual circumstances, which can spark associations you never would have thought about if you are stuck at a desk.
4. If you are in a team environment, put up a corkboard or a white board to give your fellow designers an area where they can display ideas that may pop into their heads.  These mental post-its can inspire productive meetings brimming with ideas.
5. Sketchnoting is an excellent tool to generate creative ideas and is an offshoot of the above example.  You can sketchnote using your smart notebooks and join sketchnoting communities for ideas about how other creative  do it. Click on the Sketchnoting link for a primer on how to do it.
6. When searching for proper images you don’t have to be literal with the image library licensed by your clients.  Other images may do the trick.  Two immediate sources are https://unsplash.com and https://commons.wikimedia.org.
7. Start at the end and work your way backwards.  Sound like putting the cart before the horse?  From a learning perspective, you can clearly state your end goal and then figure out how you arrived at that point.
8. Take an object like a ruler and think of ten other ways it can be used.
9. Look outside your window and take in the natural world and all its changes.  You will find that very little is static.  Shapes, colours, and vistas are dynamic and this meditation can shake some new ideas loose.
10. Study ad campaigns you find particularly effective and incorporate those ideas into your eLearning.
11. Think about the threads that wind through your eLearning. In concrete terms this could mean sales training based on customer scenarios and how they experience a product or service. For call center training create  customer-centric situations involving solving tricky technical problems.

Perhaps you have some successful ideas of your own you’d like to share with My Learning Space. After all, the more cooks you have when stewing up ideas, the outcome is usually a tastier plate.