I began my idea generation process by re-doing one of the workshop exercises (which can be found here). This time, I approached it with my own personal interests, things that make me cry, laugh, angry, excited, and things that stimulate me intellectually. I enjoyed doing this task alone as I was able to really think about these prompts from my own perspective and wasn't influenced by other people's preferences.
I then went on to circle the main topics that I wanted to carry on with. Ultimately, I picked three from the 'what interests me' section, one from 'what makes me cry', one from 'what makes me laugh', one from 'what makes me angry', one from 'what stimulates me intellectually', and one from 'makes me excited'. I made sure to select at least one from each group as I wanted to explore all categories in this early stage of generating ideas, so I got broad results that could take me in multiple directions.
I took these eight topics and explored them further using the lotus blossom technique. This really helped me to break each one apart into sub-categories that lie within the overarching theme. I found this task slightly challenging as I was having to think outside the box for most of these concepts. However, in the end I was very pleased with my final lotus blossom and generated topics that I didn't previously think of before.
After this, I looked at each theme and chose six that I wanted to take forward. I was able to group 'surprises' 'kindness' and 'other people laughing' together as they were all quite similar. From these, I selected six topics that I found most interesting.
Here are the themes and topics I chose:
Mental health
Bullying
Fitness/going to the gym
Surprises/kindness/other people laughing