Design Operations Guide

Designing

Convergent & Divergent Thinking Cycles

The design phase is made up on successive cycles of convergent and divergent thinking. This means that, as you move through the design phase, you will have to flow between thinking generatively and creatively and analytically and reductively. The balance between these throught paradigms characterizes a successful design phase, as both are necessary to realizing the potential of the opportunity spaces identified in the discovery phase and meeting the participants’ needs.

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.

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It can be tough for some people to lasso their ideas out of the big blue sky and tug them back to earth, while for other people the challenge is to ever let go of contraints and dream big. These natural tendencies is why having a team of diverse talents is crucial; each of us has our natural gravitational pull, but together we balance each other out.

What is divergent thinking?

Call it ideation, brainstorming, “thinking outside the box,” or whatever you like — divergent thinking is about exploration, and it’s a core practice of most designers. It happens intuitively, when we allow ourselves to wonder, speculate, or ask “what if?”—but it’s also important to do it intentionally throughout your design process.

At this point, you may already have some design ideas in mind. Maybe the strategy, solution, or approach you’re seeking has seemed clear from the start. Or maybe you have some insight into the problem you’re hoping to resolve, but you still aren’t sure how to go about addressing it. In either case, resist the temptation to either fixate on your first ideas or to despair about your lack of ideas. Before you decide to go all-in or give up, you owe it to yourself and to the design process to make time for divergent thinking and imaginative exploration.

The Human-Centered Design process has some intentional moments of divergent thinking built in. They generally follow stages of work that require targeted, tight, and focused thinking. Since you’ve just done some tightly focused work through setting your project up for success in the previous section, now is the time to let your thoughts roam free and unhampered.

To get into this expansive mindset, everyone on the team should work to let go of any thoughts that keep you in the world of practicalities, constraints, timelines, and naysaying. Allow your minds to wander into a world of possibility. Go outside. Go for a walk. Talk about or read things that are unrelated to work. Let your mind roam, explore, and play.

Cultivating the spirit and space for this kind of divergent thinking may come naturally to you, or it may take some practice. With practice, it will hopefully come to feel like “the fun part” of your process, where you give yourself the freedom to fully exercise your creativity. Use the activities in this section to get started.

What is convergent thinking?

Convergent thinking is decision-making. In the convergent parts of the design phase, you see if your ideas hold up and maintain their integrity when confronted with the constraints, curve balls, and imperfections of daily life. By observing how your ideas contend with reality, you’ll know which ones are ready for further development.

There may be tough choices as you pare down, edit out, mix together, pick between, and let go of some ideas in favor of others. There is an expression in the literary world that sometimes you have to “kill your darlings,” which means walking away from ideas you really like if they don’t serve the greater good of your project. For example, you might really, really want to design a game, but, when you look at the participants’ needs and project constraints, a game just won’t answer to both. So you have to walk away from that idea.

Convergent thinking may come to feel like “the hard part” of your design process, but it’s an essential step in transforming your intentions into action. Doing this in a group requires careful communication and consensus building.

The convergent frameworks in this section provides some tools and techniques to help you start identifying your constraints and reality checks, so that you can discern which of your design ideas is the most ready and able to meet the real world.