Design Operations Guide

Convergent Thinking 1

Project Mapping, Skills Assessment, and Budget Making

Convergent Thinking

The frameworks in this section will help you see the ideas you generated in the last section through the lens of your resources and project constaints. This can be a little bit of a tense session, as people might feel that their ideas are being run over or thrown out of the window.

The Lab’s Constructive Critique training module can help you and your teammates navigate these discussions with aplomb. If you’ve not been able to attend a Constructive Critique module, simply be aware of how ideas are discussed in the group so that everyone feels heard and that decisions are made based on a logical, rather than emotional, basis.

An illustration of the convergent and divergent cycles in the design phase. The cycles are ordered like this: idea generation and concept mapping are divergent; project mapping, skills assessment, and budget making are convergent; references gathering and making are divergent; design analysis, testing, and evaluation are convergent; design expressions and design revisions are divergent; retesting and iteration are convergent.

Click to enlarge the above image

Project Mapping

Use the Project map to help you define the constraints in your design project. These constraints include: the who, what, when, where, and why of your project. The “why” is divided into two parts: for the project principle, and for the participant problem. Understanding that these are not always the same is important, as their differences or similarities will determine with whom and how you test your idea.

This is an evolution of your first Project Plan, now that you have design ideas to consider alongside your practical constraints.

Fill out this framework for each design idea.

This framework provides space for the design team to fill in the who, what, when where, why for principles and why for participant problems of an idea.

Team Framework

Use the Team framework to define the skills and resources you have or do not have in your project team.

This framework provides space for the design team to fill in the skills that the team has. It divides the skills into Project Scale, Team Skills, Partner Skills, and Data.

Build a Budget

Use the Budget framework to figure out how many resources you have for your project, and if they will be sufficient for the task at hand.

This framework provides space for the design team to fill the budget need.