Inspi­ra­tion and the design process

Inspi­ra­tion is an essen­tial part of cre­ativ­i­ty, inno­va­tion and design — yet in prac­tice, idea gen­er­a­tion often takes place in an unsort­ed man­ner and on the basis of gut feel­ings. Dr. Jens Mühlst­edt, UX expert and usabil­i­ty engi­neer at des­ig­naf­fairs, showed that it does­n’t have to be this way and how it can be done dif­fer­ent­ly at the mem­bers’ event of bay­ern design forum e.V. in April 2021.

“Hold my beer. Why stu­pid ideas are good for seri­ous prob­lems… and why seri­ous struc­tur­ing of idea gen­er­a­tion is good for cre­ative chaos” was the title of his talk on inspi­ra­tion in design process­es. Unsur­pris­ing­ly for design­ers: inspi­ra­tion is hard work, and always so. Ideas don’t just fly at you, they need a team, suit­able meth­ods and a well-struc­tured process. In Jens Mühlstedt’s expe­ri­ence, brain­storm­ing works bet­ter when it is struc­tured. Inspi­ra­tion process­es, he explained with many exam­ples, con­sist of three phas­es: Offload, Look Around and Go Wild. For each phase, he pre­sent­ed a small selec­tion of suit­able meth­ods and mate­ri­als and also shed light on indi­vid­ual and group creativity.

bay­ern design mem­ber des­ig­naf­fairs is an award-win­ning design and inno­va­tion con­sul­tan­cy with offices in Munich, Erlan­gen and Shang­hai. A team of over 100 inter­dis­ci­pli­nary experts* works across indus­tries for clients world­wide — from star­tups to glob­al orga­ni­za­tions. des­ig­naf­fairs was found­ed in 1997 and has been part of the inter­na­tion­al con­sul­tan­cy Accen­ture since 2018.

The dig­i­tal event series “bay­ern design at” is aimed exclu­sive­ly at mem­bers of bay­ern design forum e.V.. Remain­ing places are also open to indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies inter­est­ed in mem­ber­ship. The one-hour vir­tu­al events in the series take place at irreg­u­lar inter­vals on Tues­days from 17:00 to 18:00 via Zoom.

Want to join us for one of our upcom­ing mem­ber­ship events? Con­tact us for infor­ma­tion about becom­ing a mem­ber of bay­ern design forum e.V.