I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work.

Okay, today's topic came from a suggestion on my blog. Today I'm going to talk about brainstorming.

So I'm responsible for the early part of design, exploratory design, vision design.

And our job is to take a blank piece of paper and make it not blank.

We have to create something from nothing.

And one of the tools we use to do that is brainstorming.

So I'm going to spend some time today talking about what exactly brainstorming is,

how do we do it, and just some tips and tricks for those of you out there that want to brainstorm

better. That's today's topic. Okay, so the idea of a brainstorm is I have a bunch of people

in a room, talented people that have good ideas, and I have a problem to solve, and I want, it's sort of one of the initial parts of solving a problem.

That early on, especially in exploratory design, one of the things you need to do when you're trying to solve a problem is kind of map the problem.

So what you want to do, so the first thing for brainstorming is, brainstorming works best when you're

trying to solve a specific problem.

Now that problem can be, doesn't have to be pinpoint.

For example, I often think we do in exploratory design, especially when we're doing top-down,

is we do a brainstormer like, okay, what kind of things would people want to see?

Now, we're focused, we're like, oh, this is Indistrade, we're doing Gothic horror,

this is Theros, we're doing Greek mythology.

I mean, we're focused in on what we're talking about.

And that's the first sort of lesson for brainstorming is that brainstorming is an effective tool, but you don't want too open-ended.

You have to go, we're trying to solve the following problem.

The problem doesn't have to be, once again, can be a larger, looser problem, but you're,

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