More SIT Tools for Ideation

Multiplication for Qualitative Change

Let's:

• Identify where SIT tools could be applied on a journey map
• Define multiplication and explain why qualitative change is crucial to the definition
• Apply multiplication to the mapped components of a product or service

According to a 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), doctors in the early 2010s were often prescribing antibiotics when they weren’t necessary.

• Nearly 1/3 of antibiotics prescribed in emergency rooms and doctors' offices were clinically unnecessary.
  • Of the 154 million antibiotic prescriptions in 2010 and 2011, 47 million were given to patients with virus-induced symptoms.
  • Since antibiotics target bacteria, not viruses, these prescriptions were ineffective.

Children under two years old were receiving the majority of these ineffective antibiotic prescriptions. What do you think the important latent pain point was for parents that led to this over-prescribing of antibiotics?

Some clinicians reported being pressured into prescribing the medicine by parents. When their children became sick, parents were often afraid and wanted a concrete solution quickly. The insight here is that parents want to feel like healthcare professionals are listening to them and addressing their concerns.

The overuse of antibiotics over time can escalate into a serious health problem. With repeated exposure to antibiotics, bacteria eventually adapt and become more resistant. This created a pressing need for a solution to the over-prescription of antibiotics.

Fighting the threat of antibiotic resistance became a public health priority, and the CDC launched several major initiatives and public health campaigns to address it.

Let's briefly sketch a journey map of parents visiting the doctor with a sick child (getting to the doctor, waiting for the appointment, etc.).

Then answer the following question: Where are the opportunities for an intervention in this scenario?

You could intervene at several moments in this journey. Examine the following sample journey map, which emphasizes how parents keep returning to the doctor because their needs aren’t being met.

In the US, one solution focused on the moment when the patient receives the prescription. It involved having doctors write two prescriptions instead of one.

The first prescription was not an antibiotic - it was a different drug that addressed the symptoms that were making children uncomfortable. The second prescription was an antibiotic, but it could only be filled 24 hours after the first prescription if symptoms persisted.

This idea made the prescription process more complex, but it solved the latent pain point in this situation: Parents felt as if their fears and concerns were being addressed. In one study using this approach, there were 27% fewer antibiotic prescriptions filled for children presenting with influenza symptoms.

This is an example of another SIT tool: multiplication.

• Multiplication involves multiplying a component of the product, service, business model or strategy, and making a required adjustment - a qualitative change:
  • Make an additional copy (or copies) of a component in the Closed World.
  • The added component must be different from the original in some way.

In this case, the prescription was multiplied, and the new prescription was a different kind of medicine. This allowed the new medicine (and time) to help many children improve, thus reducing the need for the original prescription of antibiotics.

To demonstrate multiplication, I like to pose the following scenario. Imagine that the postal system in a certain country was corrupt. Any letter, package, or box would be opened in the sorting office, and anything valuable would be removed. Theft was so common and profitable that the sorters never bothered to open anything that was locked, even if they suspected it contained valuables. Now I want you to imagine a man named Jack who has bought a beautiful diamond for his fiancée, Jill, who lives in another town. He wants to get the diamond to her as quickly as possible. Neither he nor Jill could travel to the other city. Jack had a box with a padlock and a key. He could put the gem in the box, lock it, and send the box through the postal system knowing that it would not be pried open and that it would be delivered to Jill. But what good would that do? Jill would not have the key, and Jack couldn't send it separately because it would be stolen. Jack phoned Jill, and between them, they hatched a clever scheme to send the diamond in the mail. What do you think they did without breaking any locks or using a combination lock? How could Jack and Jill use multiplication to send the diamond?

Here is the answer to the lock puzzle. Jack sends the locked box with the diamond to Jill without sending the key. Jill then attaches her own second lock to it. Now the box has two locks. When Jill returns the box, Jack takes off his lock using his key. Jack then mails it back with only Jill's lock, and Jill can open the box with her key. In this case, multiplication was applied to the lock. Jill's lock reflected the qualitative change: It was a different kind of lock, one that she could open and Jack could not.

This is a simple story, but the SIT thinking tools are designed to be simple to apply. For multiplication, you take a characteristic, multiply it, change it, and see what you get. If the result isn't useful, try multiplying another characteristic. Qualitative change is essential. The multiplied component must be different from the original in some way. For example, if a razor manufacturer were to simply add more blades to its razor, that would not fit the definition of multiplication, or of innovation for that matter. What is novel or useful about two identical blades instead of one? However, if the manufacturer installed those blades at different angles, that improves the performance of the razor - the first blade lifts, and the next one cuts. This is a qualitative change and a small but noteworthy innovation.

There are numerous examples of multiplication in the world today. Think of the different lanes on a highway. The qualitative difference is speed: There are slower lanes for exiting, middle lanes for cruising, and faster passing lanes. Consider also the gears on a bicycle, which allow riders to change the difficulty of pedaling on different gradients.

While multiplication is useful in product development, it can be productively applied to other types of offerings too. Business models, for example, have many complex components that can be manipulated and multiplied:

• Different types of bank accounts
• Different suppliers with different contracts to manage different supply risks
• Different customers and shoppers, and additional consumer segments
  • In the early 2000s, the lingerie and apparel company Victoria’s Secret created Pink, a subsidiary brand with stores located next to parent locations, to attract a new segment of younger customers from ages 13 to 22.
• Separate distribution channels - such as online or retail. For example:
  • Retail corporation Target created a digital channel through Target.com.
  • Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy charged manufacturers like Samsung and Sony to serve as their showrooms. The original retail space was multiplied - the change was the new dedicated space for the manufacturers’ products.
  • The department chain Kohl’s used its stores to not only sell products, but also serve as a return point for Amazon.

Each of these components has subcomponents. For example, the separate distribution channels can be divided by location of channel, identity of distributor, and so on.

As with task unification and the other SIT thinking tools, once you have identified the components in the Closed World, you simply apply the tool and consider the results.

The following table lists just a few of the components of Apple’s business model. These components have subcomponents of their own.

For this exercise, choose one of these components - or any other component you can think of - and apply multiplication. What did you multiply, and what was the qualitative change? What do you think of the result?

This may have seemed like a daunting challenge, but don't worry too much about the viability of your idea. Multiplication should be a low-stakes activity: You pick a component, multiply it with qualitative change, and evaluate the results. Many ideas will not be viable, and that is okay. The goal is to become more comfortable allowing yourself to generate ideas. You can also reflect on how your idea compares with those of your team.

Division and Subtraction for Removing Essentials

Now, we are going to:

• Define structural fixedness and tools that can overcome it: division and subtraction
• Apply division and/or subtraction to a product and a process

We will examine how participants attempted another puzzle: the Famous Trick Donkeys puzzle, created in 1858. It was popular at the time and sold millions of copies. 

Before we discuss, you may wish to attempt the puzzle yourself:

• Download and print the image, and cut along the dotted lines.
• Arrange the three pieces so that both riders are seated properly on the donkeys. 
• All three pieces must remain flat on the surface in front of you, and no bending or further cutting is allowed.
• After examining the pieces, you may proceed with the article...

The Famous Trick Donkeys puzzle was popular because of the simple mental block - what we would call structural fixedness today - that prevented most people from solving it.

As you learned earlier, structural fixedness means interpreting objects and services as wholes that cannot be divided. We will practice with two other SIT tools, division and subtraction, to overcome it.

Division and subtraction begin with breaking the existing situation into components of the Closed World.

First, let’s discuss division.

• Division: By dividing a product, service, business model, or strategy into components, you see the collection in a new light. This process allows you to reconfigure parts in unanticipated ways.

As with multiplication, we break the existing situation into components. But instead of multiplying those components, we consider what can be divided and rearranged.

This may sound straightforward, and for some products it will be. But it takes patience and practice moving past assumptions about the “wholeness” of most products and services.

Examples of division include:

• Zipcar divides traditional car-rental periods into smaller 30-minute increments.
• Stripped bonds divide the principal and the coupons to create two separate investment products.
• IKEA divides furniture into parts and sells the furniture unassembled.
• PillPack divides pills from different prescriptions and reassembles them into packs organized by the date and time when they should be taken.

How are timeshare property investments an example of division?

Timeshares divide property ownership among several owners, or they divide residency rights among several “right-to-use” purchasers.

Let's discuss an example of SIT’s work with the New York office of the insurance organization AXA Equitable. SIT applied division to help AXA solve a problem with retirement annuities.

Note how considering the benefits of an idea first - part of the Function Follows Form principle - helped overcome resistance to a useful solution.

The challenge with the retirement annuities is that because it's a legal contract, it's quite convoluted and not everybody completely understands all of the sections and how to fill them out and the right answers and the right information to put in each of the areas. The result of that, not only with AXA but throughout the entire industry, was a phenomenon called NIGO, not in good order. Contracts that are filled out but can't be processed because they're not filled out properly. In fact, it was such a huge industry problem that the average number of NIGO for filling out forms for these retirement annuities was 50%, which means 50% of all forms needed to be returned to the person to fill it out again, usually multiple times. That, of course, had a strong financial impact at AXA and every other insurance company because they had to go back and redo the work all the time, as well as an impact on the customer because of the frustration of filling out this form over and over and over again.

In division, we imagined the process of filling out the contract to happen in a very different order from the way it was structured right now. As you can imagine because division helps us break structural fixedness, it was a lot of resistance to that concept because it is a legal document and there are laws and regulations as to how that contract needs to be structured. In fact, it's a very complex issue because the regulations are different in the United States, depending on what state you live in. Each state has its own standard for how the contract needs to look. And so, at the end of the day, as a very large corporate, they created one contract for standardization purposes that met all of the requirements of the various states to meet their regulations.

So when we started thinking about division and saying let's move around pieces of the contract, that immediately brought about much resistance because it just isn't possible. It's against the regulatory rules of the various states. But, as we know, when you apply those fixedness breaking tools like division, we have to first think about the benefits. And the obvious benefit is that if we thought about it in sections, and then we had them fill it out according to those sections, then it would be a much more intuitive process. And by making it a more intuitive process, there would be fewer errors.

So when we got to that realization and had strong benefits, now we have to overcome our challenge. First of all, we can use a digital environment and just have them fill it out in whatever is the natural order. But in the end, the application would structure it in the order that's necessary for the contract itself. So in order for the contract to be signed at the end, it would be in the right order. But the process of filling it out is a completely different order that comes much more naturally.

In summary, SIT recommended not only dividing the contract into parts that could be filled out digitally in a more intuitive way, but also dividing the process of filling out the contract. First, the customer fills out the contract online, and then the form reassembles itself electronically into the legally required order.

You could also think of this as multiplication - the creation of an additional digital phase for filling out the form. It does not matter how you reach a new idea. The tools are simply guides for thinking creatively.

SIT noted strong resistance at AXA to the idea of dividing the contract. Why is resistance to an idea often a sign that you are making progress toward innovation?

Resistance is often a sign that attempts to break fixedness are working. As SIT will explain later, resistance to an idea is often proof of its novelty. Truly novel ideas may seem impossible to implement because we are naturally drawn to their challenges. Novel ideas also challenge established processes and our comfort in existing models. It is valuable to fully listen to those raising objections, but the Function Follows Form principle asks us to consider the benefits of new ideas too.

Let’s briefly introduce another SIT thinking tool for addressing structural fixedness.

• Subtraction: To improve a product, you remove attributes - sometimes even ones deemed indispensable - rather than adding features or attributes.

Once again, you break the existing situation into components of the Closed World. But subtraction focuses on removing something previously thought essential.

• What is a circus without animals? The acrobatic Cirque du Soleil is one possible result.
• What is a production model without inventory? Subtracting inventory gives us the framework for just-in-time (JIT) inventory systems.
• The key is that both components - animals and inventory - were considered essential to the existing situation.

In the following video, SIT explains how they applied subtraction to help inspire the creation of the first slimline DVD players:

A long time ago, in 2001, we were working with Philips Consumer Electronics. And it was the time when, those of you who may remember, there was a machine called the VCR, a video cassette recorder. And it was the transition between a VCR and another machine, which isn't very popular nowadays, which is the DVD player. The first generation of DVD players looked exactly like VCRs. They looked the same thing. It was a thick box in which you put the DVD. It had many buttons, electronics on the inside. And Philips had called us in because they were trying to design something very different, something very new, that would help them stand out.

As we applied the subtraction tool, we said, let's subtract the buttons from the DVD player. Now, that resulted in a lot of resistance, especially from the marketing people, who did all the market research in advance. And they understood exactly what buttons were expected to do because the buttons are what actually create the functions. If you don't have the right buttons, then you can't get to all the functionality. Now, the engineers had spent so many man-hours and blood and sweat on creating all of those features in the DVD player that they said, if you subtract our buttons, then we're not going to have all these functions that we put so much effort into. And then we're just going to have a dumbed down DVD player. That doesn't make any sense at all.

So we had to really deal with that resistance. As you've already learned in the Function Follows Form flow, you have to first think about the benefits and then the challenges. Challenges always surface first, because people are always very defensive about why something can't happen. But first, we have to understand what could be the benefits. What are the benefits? One answer was - well, the marketing people said, you know what? People keep asking for functions. But when we did the marketing research, we found that there are only, really, six functions that people use. They keep asking for more. But they're not really being used. So we might not really need to have all of those buttons in there. The engineers said, if we didn't have the buttons, then we could make the face, the front of the DVD player, much thinner, because it used to be that we needed the thickness of the VCR because the video cassettes were very thick. And we needed a time stamp so that people would know where they're running and how and where they are in the movie. But in the DVD world, everything's digital. Everything's being displayed on the television itself. The DVD is much thinner. The DVD itself is much thinner.

And because the remote control is standard, everyone has the buttons already in their hands. And what emerged from that entire process was a new product, which really differentiated Philips and helped them capture a much higher percentage of the market at the time, that they dubbed the "slimline DVD." Now, the reason I'm telling this story is that although the technology has gone obsolete, although no real DVD player still exists in the market, if you google and find the term "slimline," "slimline" has become a design archetype. So oftentimes, when organizations talk about new technologies or new products that they're coming out with, they say that it has a slimline design. And the slimline design actually emerged from that work of subtraction that created a lot of resistance. But if you're not resisting, it means that it's really not new. You're not breaking any fixedness.

The buttons on the front of the first DVD players were considered essential, but subtracting them created significant value for consumers.

The following are other examples of subtraction from the world today:

• The Peloton bicycle and media service subtracted gyms and personal trainers.
• Amazon subtracted the physical store, cashiers, and other workers through the creation of fulfillment centers.
• Dell Computers subtracted retail stores by selling directly to customers and allowing them to customize their computers - memory, RAM, and so on. (This customization is also an example of division.)
• Netflix subtracted the video rental store.
• Harvard Business School and other institutions have subtracted the classroom to offer courses online.
• iPads subtracted the keyboard and disk drive from traditional computers.
• Motorcycle ambulances subtracted the bed and many other components from the emergency service. (This allows them to cut through traffic and apply life-saving treatments as soon as possible.)
• Non-violent struggles and movements subtracted violence from revolution.

Consider the following products: a stationary exercise bicycle, and a cup of instant noodle soup. How was subtraction applied to each?

In the case of the stationary bicycle, the wheels were subtracted from a traditional bicycle. In the other example, instant soup, water is subtracted (and later supplied by the consumer).

Importantly, both subtracted components were considered absolutely essential - what is a bicycle without wheels, or soup without water?

You now know several tools for breaking fixedness - task unification, multiplication, division, and subtraction. You may wonder which one of these tools should I apply in any given situation? You do not need to be so discerning. Once you have the design principles, simply apply any tool and see what you get. Different SIT thinking tools may lead to the same ideas, or each may provide a unique perspective. In this phase of divergent thinking, try to generate as many ideas as possible. Then use function follows form thinking to identify the benefits and challenges so you can refine them.

For example, what if you subtracted the keyboard from a personal computer? Or, in the business model of selling groceries, what if you subtracted the physical store? The SIT thinking tools allow you to quickly cycle ideas like this. During the process, you may want to revisit your research in the clarify phase. For example, when you are analyzing the components of a product, service, model, or strategy, you may find it helpful to return to the AEIOU or journey map tools. They can often help you think of new components of the overall user experience. For example, some employers hire job candidates before they even leave college. This is an example of division. Certain components of the recruitment and application processes are rearranged to occur at different points in the applicant's journey. Where might innovators have found those opportunities for intervention on a journey map?

We introduce the four phases of design thinking in a linear way because that is the easiest way to learn them. And when you are first applying these tools in the workplace, that is the best way to practice them as a novice. However, once you are confident in the process, you will jump back and forth between phases in whatever way works best for you.

Review the following diagram of a stethoscope. Think about the tool itself, as well as the entire user journey of receiving a check-up.

What would happen if you subtracted the rubber tube? Applying the Function Follows Form principle, think about the benefits first: How could this new form create value?

Subtracting the tube creates a tool with two separate parts: a bell and a headpiece. One possible idea is connecting these pieces digitally. This allows healthcare professionals to capture the sounds inside the body with a separate sensor and transmit them digitally to the headpiece.

What might the benefits be? You could send the sensors to people in far-off places - think refugee camps and other hard-to-reach locations - to help patients receive virtual consultations.

The following is a fuller list of benefits and challenges:

• Possible benefits: telehealth opportunities, better sanitation, automatic data collection and organization, amplifying certain sounds over others, assisting physicians with hearing impairments
• Possible challenges: expense of technology and distribution, ensuring that the audio quality is just as good if not better than that of a traditional stethoscope, guaranteeing that there are no glitches or errors

The discussion of benefits and challenges opens up numerous opportunities for additional innovations in products and services. This reinforces how opportunities can be easier to identify after a virtual product has been created.

Attribute Dependency for Comparing Relationships

Let's:

• Define relational fixedness and the tool for overcoming it: attribute dependency
• Apply attribute dependency to design problems

The final SIT thinking tool addresses relational fixedness. To understand this type of fixedness, I would like you to consider an old riddle. A father and son are in a car accident and the father dies. The son is injured and rushed to the hospital. Just as the son is about to go in for surgery, the surgeon takes one look and says, "I can't operate on the boy because he is my son." But the boy's father has just passed away. How is this possible? If you answered that the surgeon is the boy's second father, you have found one simple answer. Another answer is equally simple: The surgeon is the boy's mother.

As clear as these answers seem, many people to this day are stumped by the riddle because the phrasing tricks us into falling back on cultural assumptions about men and women. I have heard wild answers, like the father in the car accident miraculously survived and made it to the hospital first, and so on. The difficulty in finding a clear answer is often a result of relational fixedness, which is very difficult to break. If you grew up only seeing male surgeons, then your brain might unconsciously have a hard time making any other connection than man and surgeon, especially under pressure. This illustrates the importance of reflecting on how you think before moving ahead to generating ideas.

Relational fixedness is the most complex type of fixedness because it is the most abstract.

• Relational Fixedness: The tendency to view relationships and dependencies between attributes of a product or situation as static and permanent.

Every product, service, business model, or strategy has a series of internal attributes that are controlled by the creator or manufacturer. For a traditional pair of eyeglasses, these attributes include the type of lens, the frames, and the tint of the glass.

There are also external factors that are out of the creator or manufacturer’s control. They are related to how the product is experienced. For traditional eyeglasses, these factors include the amount of glare from the sun and the viewing distance of the user.

If you create a table of these internal attributes and external factors, with internal as the columns and external as the rows, you have a powerful tool for comparing their relationships.

Each cell is an opportunity for you to evaluate the relationship between an internal attribute and an external factor. They may be dependent, or they may be completely unrelated. Both observations are valuable.

Let’s say that 1 represents a dependency, and 0 means there is no dependency. For a traditional pair of eyeglasses, what would be the value for “Tint of Glass” and “Amount of Glare?” Explain your answer.

For both regular eyeglasses and sunglasses, there is no dependency between the tint and glare. The tint is the same, no matter how strong the sun is. Therefore, the value is 0.

The assumption that this relationship could never change is what we mean by relational fixedness.

Overcoming relational fixedness means challenging yourself to imagine what it might look like to add or remove a dependency. To overcome relational fixedness, we use the tool called attribute dependency, which is the table you just began to complete.

• Attribute dependency: A tool used to create, change, or eliminate dependencies between variables of a product or a system (internal attributes) and its environment (external factors)

Real-world examples include:

• Sensors embedded in products: Glasses with photochromic lenses adjust their tint to the amount of sunlight. Some windshield wipers adjust automatically to the amount of rain.
• Loyalty programs: The length of relationship and amount of business result in special privileges.

Attribute dependency is a strong tool for breaking relational fixedness. The process begins by creating a table like the one you observed in the eyeglasses example. You can choose any internal attributes or external factors for the table. Each cell where the two meet represents a chance to create a new dependency, or alternatively, to break an existing dependency.

Changing the dependency results in a discussion of what the virtual product might look like. And, as with other SIT thinking tools, you can apply the Function Follows Form principle and envision the potential benefits and challenges of this idea.

To understand this process better, let's return to the mop example from earlier in the module. What are some of the internal characteristics of a traditional mop? Let's say the length of the handle and the absorption power of the mop. Another internal characteristic is the depth of the bucket, if it comes with one. Now, let's think of some external factors. What is it like to use a mop? What conditions affect how you use it? We know from Look, Ask, Try that you sometimes need to clean places that are out of reach or difficult to reach. Let's put distance to the cleaning area as an external characteristic. Another external characteristic could be the dirtiness of the floor. It might be slightly dirty or extremely dirty. Have you noticed how these external factors come from the pain points established in the clarify phase? The difficulties that users encounter often show us where in the environment we should focus our attention.

Now that a brief attribute dependency table is complete, let's identify dependencies between internal attributes and external factors. Are these attributes and factors related? Can any relationships be created, changed, or eliminated? For example, with the traditional mop, there is no relationship between handle length and distance to the cleaning area. What if there were a dependency there? What if there was a product that had an adjustable handle to reach those higher or harder to reach places? How about the absorption of the mop fibers? The fibers are the same, no matter how dirty the floor is. We might create a dependency there and think of a virtual product that has different cleaning surfaces for different areas. Or maybe a spray that can be used for a tougher mess. All this practice with the mop has been leading to a specific and very successful innovation.

In the mid-1990s, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) was hoping to generate billions in revenue from new product lines in the floor-cleaning market. Originally, P&G wanted to develop a stronger cleaner.

However, the design consultancy Continuum found key insights in user research:

• Consumers were spending just as much time cleaning the mop as they were cleaning the floor.
• They disliked touching the dirty mop.
• The task was difficult and unpleasant enough that there was tension over who would do the mopping.

With design principles like effectiveness of cleaning, reduced time to clean, and increased ease of use, P&G launched the Swiffer mop as part of a product line that promised “fast clean.”

It also changed dependencies that were considered fixed in traditional mops. For example:

• The Swiffer has a handle that extends or contracts depending on how far away the mess is (new dependency between distance and handle length).
• It uses disposable pads that do not require cleaning or touching (removed dependency between the dirtiness of the floor and the cleanliness of the mop).

You could use the SIT thinking tools to create a solution like the Swiffer mop - or something entirely different. The design principles based on user research and insights will always affect the results of ideation.

For further practice with attribute dependency, imagine that you are a designer in the cell phone industry, and you are evaluating dependencies to ideate on new offerings.

The internal characteristics are ringtone, connection speed, and cost of service. The external factor is the specific person calling.

What are the current dependencies in this table (0 or 1 for each cell), and what happens when you change them? What are the benefits of your first ideas for these changes?

Many of T-Mobile’s innovations in the phone market were the result of changing dependencies. For example:

• They removed the dependency between costs and roaming by offering unlimited calling and texting between certain countries and on certain plans.
• They removed the dependency between data usage and cost of service by offering unlimited data plans.

You can also add dependencies...

Evaluation Within the Creative Matrix

We will now:

• Apply the SIT tools to populate the creative matrix

The following creative matrix includes all the SIT thinking tools we have introduced so far in this module.

When you are ideating, you don’t need to apply every tool. The tools and frameworks do not form a rigid process you must always follow. Instead, they are optional guides for breaking cognitive fixedness.

When you are more familiar with the concepts, you will have the confidence and freedom to adapt them to whatever the context requires.

Apply the tools to generate additional ideas for the matrix. What ideas could you put in the cells under Sustainability and Low Waste, and how would they complement the existing ideas?

We cannot list all possible responses. Let’s explore one response you may have suggested:

• Multiplication: Reusable cleaning pad instead of a disposable one
  • Benefits: Low waste, and consumers can save money by buying replacements less often. If they are machine washable, cleaning is as simple as adding pads to the laundry. Mops can fit both reusable and disposable pads.
  • Challenges: This would affect revenue from selling the cleaning pads. Remember from research that users disliked touching the dirty mop. Would the mop need a button to instantly release the pads into the laundry without touching them?

Let's revisit the full creative matrix with the design principles of effectiveness of cleaning, reduced time to clean, and convenience and ease of use. This is an example of how a team might have filled it out in the discussions that led to the idea for the Swiffer. Notice that some ideas, like "shaft with joints," addresses all of the design principles, whereas some, like "disposable pad" and "subtract bucket," only addresses one. Yet, all of these design ideas made it into the final innovation.

The creative matrix does not deliver a finalized idea based on the number of cells you can fill out. There is still much work to do in the later phases of design thinking. What the matrix does deliver is a way to compare numerous ideas before possibly combining them into a testable solution.

Using SIT thinking tools like task unification, multiplication, division, subtraction, and attribute dependency provides structure to the ideation process, it gives you a clear starting point in the closed world. By breaking fixedness and encouraging unconventional thinking, you can come up with a greater number of creative and original ideas.

In the next article, we'll explore slightly less structured approaches to ideation, but less structured does not mean without structure. Even when you are not applying specific thinking tools, you will find that using a creative matrix and design principles will give your discussions a user-centered focus.