Bob Sutton has taken the time to lay out his views on Brainstorming on BusinessWeek Online. His writing stems from a Wall Street Journal article outlining research that said that when it came to generating ideas, individuals working individually could be just as effective as team members working in a group. Sutton had a post on his blog refuting many of the methodologies of the quoted research, including the lack of context in the research group sessions and the fact that the participants were not professionals in a specific field and therefore not as well equipped to solve specific problems in a group.

However, rather than continuing to split hairs over methodology, his new article expands on some of these ideas and stands as a support of brainstorming itself. Both Sandberg and Sutton believe that brainstorming is a skill that takes time to develop, requires discipline to manage, and must be integrated into the culture of an organization, not just exist as panaceas to design process problems. The meat of the article is 8 tips for improving (or even deciding whether to bother with) brainstorming.

Link to Sutton Article

See Also:
Does Brainstorming Not Suck?

The 2006 IDEA Industrial Design Excellence Awards were announced recently, and I just finished leafing through all 108-odd winners. The award that stood out for me in terms of its potential to aid in the facilitation of creative activity was GE Healthcare’s 3D Mouse. Designed to enable surgeons to manipulate complex 3D medical images during surgery, the 3D Mouse

…combines control of six distinct, complex user movements (X, Y, Z rotations and X, Y, Z translations) into a single liquid-proof joystick, while providing the functionality of a standard 2D mouse for interaction with GUI functions.

This is obviously a groundbreaking advance in medical technology. With surgeons and medical professionals increasingly having access to a wide array of 3D patient data, the ability to easily accessing and interpret that data during surgery is truly a step forward.

With that said, it should only be a matter of a few years until we see devices with these capabilities crop up on our own desktop for use in non life-or-death situations. The ability to intuitively manipulate and control 3D data along that number of axes with only one hand will make the experience of 3D modelling a step closer to creating objects by hand.