Impact Creative Toolkit

Abstract

Nowadays, a common approach to cope with the inherent uncertainty in innovation is the use of multidisciplinary teams following a Design Thinking (DT) process. However this strategy has its pitfalls, such as the lack of experience with DT or the communication issues underlying a group of people with completely opposed backgrounds. In order to better understand the context of the problem, a series of interviews and two workshops with practitioners were conducted. The insights, together with the literature review helped to frame a design challenge and eventually to arrive at a design solution. After several iterations, the Impact Creative Toolkit took shape. The Impact Creative Toolkit aims at mitigating the struggles of such a team-settings that follow a DT process. More concretely, it supports multidisciplinary teams in the ideation process. It assures a constant reflection around what are the benefits, emotions and consequences for the end-user behind the ideas that come up during the creative session. The toolkit is composed of three tools: Impact Designer — where the problem statement and the desired impact are defined —, Impact Analogies — an idea generation using analogies of the pursued impact —, and Impact Detective — a roleplaying exercise where the impact is assured. An evaluation of the tools took place, from two perspectives: from the practitioners and from the HEC framework for creative tools. A number of changes were implemented and recommendations for future use suggested.