How to generate brilliant ideas with the Design Studio brainstorming exercise

Supercharge your ideation sessions with this simple 60 min exercise.

• Is your team's ideation process often yielding lackluster results? 😒

• You sometimes feel that some people’s ideas just are a bit “weak”? 😬

• Do you find that you often come up with great ideas at the end of your brainstorming sessions, but by then it's too late to incorporate them? ⏰

I've felt this way too, and I have a solution you can try: the Design Studio brainstorming workshop.

In this blog post, I will explain how to run the 3-step ideation exercise called the Design Studio. I will also explain why I think this exercise could be useful to try out as a format in the Design Sprint.

A problem with quick ideation exercises:

The challenge many teams face is that while they're great at coming up with initial ideas, they don't always explore the full spectrum of possibilities.

And from my experiences doing Design Sprints, there's a missed opportunity to iterate and refine ideas after seeing what the other team members have come up with.

For instance, the original Design Sprint framework describes a classic 4-Step-Sketch exercise as follows:

The Four-Step Sketch.

1. Notes.

2. Ideas.

3. Crazy 8s.

4. Solution sketch.

After this exercise, when it’s time to review the solution sketches that everyone created, is sometimes when you start coming up with truly great ideas. But by then it’s too late, it’s time to vote on the existing solutions and move forward – keeping the sprint momentum going.

This has always frustrated me a little. I have always felt that there is a step missing where team members get to iterate on their ideas after having seen the other team members’ ideas.

The point of the Design Sprint is to move fast and iterate later if needed. This means the 4-step sketch works well if you are committed to doing an iteration sprint (i.e. one more design sprint after you’ve tested the first prototype).

But if you are just doing the one week sprint that iteration is not likely to happen – So let’s look at an alternative to the 4-step sketch to approach brainstorming and concept sketching…the Design Studio exercise. It works as a standalone workshop, or as an exercise to incorporate into bigger workshop recipes such as the Design Sprint.

The Design Studio Method

The Design Studio workshop exercise is structured to maximize both individual creativity and group collaboration in a very short timeframe. Here are the steps:

1. Crazy 8s (8 min)

2. Lightning fast presentations to the Team (1 min per participant)

3. Steal & Refine Session (10 min)

4. Lightning fast presentations to the Team (1 min per participant)

5. Final Concept sketches (15–20 min)

As you may notice, there are three sets of sketching exercises and two rounds of presentation to the team.

Please note: If you are running this with a larger group with more than 8 people, make sure to split people up into smaller groups. I recommend between 3–8 in each group.

Why do this? Well, for example if 15 people would be in the same group, you would be spending 30 minutes in total on the presentation steps since each individual is given 1 min each to present their concept to the group. If you split those people into two groups, you half the time spent on presentations in total.

Let’s dive into each step.

Setting the stage

Going into a brainstorming exercise like Design Studio of course requires you to have a problem to solve. I’m going to be glossing over that entirely in this article and just assume that you are in a context where that is already clearly established with the participants. E.g. “How might we improve the experience of the onboarding of our app?”

If you run this as part of a Design Sprint – the task is simply to address the different sprint questions.

Either way, it's essential to ensure that participants have a clear focus during the brainstorming session.

Assuming the context and focus are established, let's begin.

Crazy 8s – 8 minutes

The Espresso Shot of Brainstorming ☕. Just as an espresso shot provides a quick, concentrated burst of energy, the Crazy 8s exercise gives your brainstorming sessions a rapid-fire boost. It's a straightforward method that cuts through the drowsiness of overthinking and helps deliver more unfiltered ideas.

To run this exercise, you need a timer and ensure that each participant has a sheet of letter-sized or A4 paper, and a semi-broad tip felt pen – like Sharpie or similar. Too narrow tip of a pen and people will become too detailed in their sketches.

Tools of the trade.

Instruct and demonstrate to participants how to fold their paper three times to create eight distinct sections.

With a timer set to 8 minutes, you instruct people to sketch an idea in each section before time's up. And stress that they’ve got a mere 60 seconds for each cell! This brisk tempo nudges participants to lean into their intuition, bypassing over-analysis and helps them just get their mind thinking creatively.

They should also work according to the “Together-Alone” workshop principle. Meaning they work individually, and in silence, no discussion allowed.

At this stage, the focus is on quantity over quality; the objective is to quickly pour out as many ideas as possible onto paper.

While facilitating this exercise, keep tabs of the timer and instruct everyone to stop sketching on their current idea and move on to the next section at each minute mark.

When I notice some people are struggling to get their pen moving, which is very normal by the way, I like to shout things like:

“Just get your pen moving, don’t be precious about this stage, you’ll get too think more deeply in the next stage”

Or to try and expand their mode of thinking I sometimes say things like:

“If you had an infinite budget, what would you think of?”

“Try to imagine you are Britney Spears after just getting out of your conservatorship, what would you come up with?”

Keep the participants moving and be strict with the timings.

At the end, a sketch could look like something like this:

The visuals doesn’t have to be self-explanatory, solid ideas – they just need to act as support and help each participants explain their thinking to the group in the following step.

The allure of Crazy 8s lies in its simplicity. By creating a sense of urgency with the short time spent on each idea section, it forces participants beyond their usual boundaries, urging them to go into less charted territories of thought.

Present to the group – 1 min per participant

In the Design Sprint, the Crazy 8s is viewed as a strictly individual exercise with the primary goal of warming up participants.

In the Design Studio however, the goal is for the output of the Crazy 8s to act as a catalyst for the other team members to build upon.

As the next step, you instruct the team to present their ideas to the team. But the catch is they only literally have 1 min to present all of their 8 ideas. This forces people to be concise and focus on their core concepts.

Make sure to also instruct people before starting to really actively listen to the presentations given and look for ideas that they could steal and refine in the coming steps.

Be aware when facilitating this though, some people will struggle with keeping time and will try to go overtime because it is really hard to for most people to gauge exactly how short 1 minute is once they start talking and presenting.

For this reason I find it helpful to clearly shout “30 seconds left”, and “10 seconds left” to help presenters realize just how fast time moves.

Once a minute has passed, you can exclaim, "Stop! Next person, you have 1 minute. Go!"

This presentation step is crucial as it exposes team members to a diverse range of concepts and perspectives before going into the next step.

Steal & Refine – 10 min

After participants have drawn inspiration from their team members, it's time to steal, and build upon each other's ideas.

This is akin to the SCAMPER framework but simplified. It's about tweaking, combining, expanding, and iterating based on the collective creativity of the group.

Each person is instructed to grab a new piece of paper, and this time they have to fold it just once. Because now they only have to produce 2 concepts each. The concepts can be two completely different ideas, or variations of the same idea.

Instruct the participants that they will have 10 minutes to create two concepts that are slightly more detailed this time around. Again, they should work according to the “Together-Alone” workshop principle – no discussion.

Similarly to the Crazy 8s, if you observe participants having difficulty, prompt them to adopt different perspectives or consider alternative constraints.

Note: if you are running this as a remote exercise, which is perfectly possible, then you can do this type of “thought prompting” regardless. It can help inspire both people that are stuck, and the people that sketching away without any hurdles.

Present to the group – 1 min per participant

Once again, instruct the team to present their ideas. The catch remains – they have just 1 minute to present their two concepts. This forces people to be concise and focus on their core concepts.

Final Concept Sketches (15–20 min)

Now the team reconvenes as a group to collaboratively develop a final idea. Exactly like in the Design Sprint – this is presented as a simple 3-panel storyboard, providing a visual narrative and a walkthrough of the concept.

Now, we’ve come to a fork in the road, how you run this part of the exercise depends if you are doing this workshop standalone, or as part of the Design Sprint.

If you are running it as standalone workshop:

In the Design Studio workshop this final concept sketch step is done as group exercise where talking is allowed and encouraged. And of course, doing it as a group, this only produces one finished concept (per team if applicable) that they agree to try out as a solution.

This final stretch can be “loud”, but it's also a lot of fun for the participants to finally get to speak to each other and iterate and create something together.

The instructions: Explain that they now have 15 minutes to co-create a final concept based off of the ideas they’ve seen so far during the workshop. Make sure to show participants and example of a finished 3-panel concept so that they understand the format and what is expected from them. Tell them this final part is done as a group and discussion is allowed and even encouraged. Set the timer and go.

If you are running it as part of the Design Sprint:

In the Design Sprint, you want to create multiple concepts to bring into a bigger storyboard in the subsequent workshop.

The instructions: Explain that they now have 15 minutes to create a final concept based off of the ideas they’ve seen so far during the workshop. Make sure to show participants and example of a finished 3-panel concept so that they understand the format and what is expected from them. Tell them this final part is also done together-alone – no discussion allowed. Set the timer and go.

This was done during a remote workshop where I’ve taken photos of my paper sketches and imported it into Miro.

Note: If you are doing this as a remote workshop with multiple groups, you’d have to send them into breakout rooms for this section.

Wrapping-up

When the timer runs out and the teams have finished their concepts it’s time to wrap up and take some action so that these concepts don’t end up in a drawer. In the Design Sprint you natrually move on to vote on concepts and start constructing the larger storyboard.

But in a standalone version of the Design Studio – I find it helpful to run a quick Action Steps-exercise to finish up if you have multiple teams that need to take action.

If you're working with a smaller, close-knit group, it's typically sufficient to designate a manager or lead with the clear responsibility of ensuring the concept is tested in their day-to-day operations.

Finish up by giving the team(s) some kudos for enduring through a sometimes stressful exercise and end the session, hopefully on a high note! ✌️

Conclusion

The Design Studio workshop exercise is a short, but very powerful tool for teams looking to elevate their ideation process. By blending individual creativity with collaborative refinement, it ensures that ideas are not only diverse but also deep and well-thought-out.

So, the next time you're looking to brainstorm solutions, consider giving the Design Studio method a try. It might just be the key to unlocking your team's full creative potential.

If you do try it out, I would love it if you wrote to me and tell me how it went. Send me an email or a DM on Linkedin.

Interested in more?

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• Check out some of my other posts on my Substack-blog for more in-depth guides and reflections.

• I help companies facilitate problem-solving workshops, Design Sprints, and nail product strategy. Schedule a call with me and we’ll discuss how I might help you.