Jam Ideation – Dictionary Definitions

The theme of the app jam is the three words:

GUIDE

OPPONENT

RESTRICTED

So the first step was to get a definition for each word from the Oxford English Dictionary online, and to then break each one down into appropriate chunks . The purpose of this is to provide a foundation for the creative process of exploring the possibilities that the theme affords. I used Powerpoint to do this as it is easy to rearrange the chunks as necessary.

The result:

Right off the bat, I’ve experienced slippage on the first task. This is down to a combination of factors:

1. The original estimate of time required for this task was a little on the optimistic side.
2. Breaking the definitions down into boxes in Powerpoint was a little more fiddly than I had anticipated.
3. I had watched the theme revelation video before tackling this stage, but I hadn’t noticed the attached papers that explained the use of VNA (Verb, Non, Adjective) cards. I have since read them (but not until after I had completed the Associations and Links stage) and I now realise that “GUIDE” must be used as a verb, and so I might have wasted some time arranging and considering the definitions and examples of “Guide” used as a noun. I could have saved some, if not all of the excess time by ignoring them. Looking at it from a different angle though, a guide, is used to guide. The two are practically interchangeable, and so, it could be argued that exploring “GUIDE” as a noun was time well spent.

I will compensate for this slippage, and bring the critical path back into line, by restricting my Brainstorm stage to 16 minutes and 50 seconds per word, instead of the planned 20 minutes, making up the 9.5 minutes overshot on this phase. To help with this, I will abandon any digital tools in favour of a fast and furious pen and paper brainstorming session.