When a group wants to generate ideas for a new product or to solve a problem, you will usually hear the clarion call, “Let’s brainstorm!” You assemble a group, spell out the basic ground rules for brainstorming (no criticism, wild ideas are welcome, focus on quantity, combine ideas to make better ideas) and then have people yell out ideas one at a time.

Brainstorming is often the method of choice for ideation, but it is fraught with problems that range from participants’ fear of evaluation to the serial nature of the process — only one idea at a time. Brainwriting is an easy alternative or a complement to face-to-face brainstorming, and it often yields more ideas in less time than traditional group brainstorming.

What Is Brainwriting?

When I teach my graduate course in “Prototyping and Interaction Design,” I start with a class on ways to generate ideas. Because brainstorming is a well-known and popular technique, I generally begin with a discussion on how to do good brainstorming, something that is very hard, and then introduce brainwriting as a worthy, and sometimes preferred, alternative to brainstorming. The term “brainwriting” often brings forth smiles and quiet laughter because it is a strange word.

Brainwriting is simple. Rather than ask participants to yell out ideas (a serial process), you ask them to write down their ideas about a particular question or problem on sheets of paper for a few minutes; then, you have each participant pass their ideas on to someone else, who reads the ideas and adds new ideas. After a few minutes, you ask the participants to pass their papers to others, and the process repeats. After 10 to 15 minutes, you collect the sheets and post them for immediate discussion.

In my experience, the number of ideas generated from brainwriting often exceeds what you’d expect from face-to-face brainstorming because you’ve reduced anxiety somewhat, followed a parallel process in which a dozen people may add items simultaneously, and reduced the amount of extraneous talk that happens during brainstorming, which takes time away from idea generation.

Instead of getting one idea at a time, lots of ideas can emerge simultaneously, if you let your participants “brainwrite” them. (Image credits: opensourceway)

When To Use Brainwriting

Brainwriting can be used in the following situations:

• You have too large a group for effective brainstorming. You could conduct brainwriting at a conference of 500 people simply by leaving a large card on each seat, asking a question, and then having each audience member pass a card to someone else, and then repeat three times for a minute of writing.
• You have quiet people in your group who are intimidated by traditional brainstorming.
• You are working in a culture in which brainstorming about “wild ideas” or expressing ideas that diverge from those of senior management is not accepted.
• Your time is limited. I’ve used brainwriting to brainstorm questions for a website visit when I had only 10 minutes to get feedback from the product team. I ended up with more than 50 different questions, without the fuss of having to set up a formal brainstorming session.
• You don’t have an experienced moderator. Brainstorming, contrary to what many blog posts claim, is difficult to do well. Brainwriting, in contrast, requires that you be able to ask a question, read a clock and collect answers.
• You are worried about loud or forceful individuals influencing others, as they might in traditional brainstorming.

Brainwriting can be used to understand how different groups view an issue. You might try to conduct separate brainwriting sessions with different internal groups. For example, if you asked groups to brainwrite about “What are the most important problems faced by our customers?” you might find that developers have a different perspective from the UX team, who have a different perspective from product managers. In my experience, the differences emerge more strongly through brainwriting than through face-to-face brainstorming.

Brainwriting can help you get a better understanding of how different groups or departments view a problem. (Image credits: opensourceway)

When To Avoid Brainwriting

While brainwriting is easy and accepted in many environments after a single demonstration of its productivity, you might want to avoid brainwriting in a few situations. There may be times when your colleagues find it difficult to express ideas in writing. If you are working on complex issues, then you might want to opt for small group brainstorming or another ideation technique that allows for clarification and discussion.

If you are forming a team, then you might want to opt for traditional brainstorming, because participants will be more familiar with that method (rather than the strange name “brainwriting”), and the social interaction will foster team-building. You might want to avoid brainwriting if you are in a culture with strict rules about which methods and procedures to follow. People who follow a highly structured product design and development process might find brainwriting a bit too radical.

How To Conduct A Brainwriting Session

My first suggestion is to search for “brainwriting” on the Web and peruse some of YouTube videos and short articles that describe brainwriting techniques and tips. There are several approaches to brainwriting: interactive brainwriting, the 6-3-5 method, the idea card method, and the remote spreadsheet method. We’ll cover the basic procedure for each of these techniques.

Interactive Brainwriting

Here are the basic steps for interactive brainwriting:

1. Introduce the procedure.
2. Hand out paper for each person to write down ideas.
3. Provide a clear and legible problem statement. (You could print out a page with the statement at the top, project the statement on a slide, or write it on a board.)
4. Describe the timing of the brainwriting (for example, three minutes for the first round, and two minutes for four subsequent rounds) and the process for passing the pages (for example, counterclockwise around a table). A page-passing process that is not clear could undermine the credibility of the method and waste time.
5. Ask if anyone has any questions about the problem statement or the brainwriting process.
6. Remind people to read the ideas quickly before entering their own ideas and to feel free to add, modify and combine ideas. Let people know that extra paper is around the room if they run out.
7. Begin the rounds. Announce the end of each round, and ask people to pass their paper to another person.
8. At the end of the session, collect the brainwriting pages and post them for comment, additional ideas or review.

Brainwriting 6-3-5

In brainwriting 6-3-5, six people are given a form and asked to provide three ideas for solving a problem in five minutes. Participants are invited to consider out-of-the-box ideas and to combine ideas with others. The ideas are written in silence to prevent participants from influencing each other. After the first five minutes, each participant passes a form like the one below to the adjacent participant, who then reviews the ideas and adds new ones.

The process is repeated six times, with a potential for 6 × 3 × 6 (or 104) ideas. In practice, I’ve found that people often come up with more than three ideas in five minutes, so you could create a 6-6-5 form.

A 6-3-5 brainwriting form. (Problem Statement: “How can we deal with extremely long lists in our application?”)

Idea Cards

This approach to brainwriting gets participants to write ideas continuously on sticky notes or cards and, as they finish a card, to place it off to the side. When other participants need inspiration, they can take a few cards from their colleagues and continue. Each card would hold only one idea.

A variation on this approach is the “one idea, quick pass,” whereby each person lists one idea on a sheet and then hands the sheet to another participant, who adds one more idea. If participants don’t have any sheets to look at, they can grab one off of a pile and continue writing. This continues until the leader of the session declares “The end.”

The Spreadsheet Technique

If you want to conduct remote brainwriting, you can use Google Spreadsheet as a brainwriting tool. You’ll need to set up a list of people who will participate and then ask each of them to enter ideas in a single column of the spreadsheet. As each person enters an idea in a cell, others would see the idea and use that as inspiration for new ideas. This process can foster a bit of mild competition if done in real time and can also be fun.

Practical Tips And Tricks For Better Brainwriting

Here are a few tips and tricks that I’ve picked up over the last 10 years or so of using the brainwriting method:

• If you are using handwritten sheets, ask people to print or write legibly.
• Ask people to be succinct but to provide enough information for the idea to be understood two weeks later.
• Ask participants to do some easy homework to prepare for brainwriting (and brainstorming). Homework can make the sessions more productive. One example of homework would be to send your problem or question to participants and ask them to jot down or think about three ideas. Make the homework fun if you can.
• Put the problem statement or ideation question on all of the sheets or write it on a board or slide if you are doing it remotely. If you use the Google Spreadsheet approach, put the question at the top of the spreadsheet.
• Ask your participants to avoid jargon and acronyms that wouldn’t be understood in a week’s time.
• Be clear about the rules for sharing idea sheets. If you have people pass them to others, designate the direction of passing the pages to avoid confusion.
• Set a timer. Most smartphones have countdown timers that work well for brainwriting.
• Mix brainstorming and brainwriting with other ideation methods. Brainstorming may generate few ideas, but sometimes the social aspects of brainstorming generate a sense of teamwork and creativity.
• If you want to create an affinity diagram from the ideas, you could prepare pages with sticky notes and then remove them when you are ready to diagram. The image below shows six pages from a brainwriting session on the topic of how to improve remote collaboration. Each page would have six sticky notes on which participants can write ideas for the topic. After the brainwriting is complete, the notes can be organized into categories using the affinity diagramming method.

You could use affinity diagramming to organize and interpret the data from brainwriting sessions. (Large view)

How To Sell Brainwriting To Your Colleagues

Brainwriting is easy to sell in most organizations and client settings. There are five ways to sell brainwriting:

• The first selling point is its scalability. You are able to gather data from a few people on your design team to hundreds of people at a conference without great cost or detailed planning.
• It does not require great facilitation or social psychology skills. All you need is a brief script, some cheap supplies or a remote tool like Google Spreadsheet, and between 10 to 30 minutes to conduct the session.
• It is efficient. Unlike brainstorming, with its serial approach to idea generation, everyone is writing ideas at the same time.
• While brainwriting is generally done in silence, each person is still stimulated from seeing other ideas.
• Perhaps most importantly, the number of ideas generated from brainwriting generally exceeds those from brainstorming.

Enjoy your experiments with brainwriting.

Resources On Brainwriting

The resources listed below are a mix of videos, articles and books. My recent book, Brainstorming and Beyond, has a full chapter on brainwriting (and on brainstorming and braindrawing).

• “Applying Creativity: Using Brainwriting to Generate Options” (video), Buffalo State College
• “Brain Writing,” Knowledge Sharing Toolkit
• “Brainwriting,” CreatingMinds
• “Creativity Techniques in Product Planning and Development: A View From West Germany,” Horst Geschka, R&D Management
• “Creativity Techniques in Germany,” Horst Geschka, Creativity and Innovation Management
• “101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: The Handbook of New Ideas for Business,” James M. Higgins
• “Brainwriting,” Mycoted
• “Enhancing Ideational Creativity in Groups: Lessons From Research on Brainstorming,” Paul B. Paulus and Vincent R. Brown, Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration
• “Brainstorming and Beyond: A User-Centered Design Method,” Chauncey Wilson

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© Chauncey Wilson for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

We all love exciting new typefaces, and 2013 has been a bumper year for type design. So, with 2013 coming to a close, we’ve put together this list of the best fonts in the last 12 months.

For each month we’ve debated long and hard, and eventually nominated a 1st place, 2nd place, and runner up. What do they win? Nothing but our admiration, and kudos for a job well done.

The eagle eyed amongst you will notice there are no winners for December. With the month only half-way through, there’s still plenty of time for new designs to appear, if you’ve come across any let us know in the comments.

Here, is our selection of the best fonts of 2013:

January

1st place

Capita (from free) – We can’t get over the attractiveness of this font. It manages to evade the typical harsh quality of slab serifs, and yet still commands our attention. Absolutely our first choice for this month.

2nd place

Trend (from $5) – Following its January debut, this charming display font has become incredibly ubiquitous. The array of versions available, from standard sans and serif to layered, make this font well-suited for a variety of needs — plus, it’s just great to look at no matter how you spin it.

Runners-up

Halis Rounded ($16) & Fiesole (from $22) – We’re huge fans of both of these fonts; Halis manages to be soft without being cartoonish, and the calligraphic style of Fiesole is attractive without sacrificing functionality.

February

1st Place

Sanchez Slab (from free) – Almost a more delicate version of the iconic Rockwell, this distinctive slab serif is eye-catching and appealing at every weight. We’re especially fond of that unique uppercase K.

2nd place

Foro Rounded (from free) – Hoftype’s addition to the Foro family is a softer but equally dynamic sibling. As charming as it is distinct, the font’s rounded edges manage not to overwhelm us at the thinner weights.

Runners-up

Number Five (from $26.10) & Supernova (from $124 approx.) – Both of these fonts are incredible scripts; Supernova is incredibly versatile, sporting multiple weights, forms, and glyphs, while Number Five, available in both smooth and rough versions, calls to mind 1940’s and 1950’s Americana.

March

1st Place

Quadon (from $25) – Designed to bridge the gap between traditional serif fonts and the modern design trend of using sans serifs, Quadon succeeds as a contemporary serif that’s flexible and loaded with design potential.

2nd place

Mission Gothic (name your price) – We’re admittedly huge fans of Lost Type Co-Op and everything they produce, so the release of Mission Gothic as a companion to their incredible Mission Script made us extremely happy.

Runners-up

Quant (from free) & Corbert (from free) – Compared to this month’s other Qua-named serif, Quant is much more traditional in form, but as classical serifs go, it’s one of the most attractive. Corbert, on the other hand, is a fantastic geometric sans serif that hails back to the early modernist era and fonts like Bauhaus.

April

1st Place

Riona Sans (from $25) – This sans serif has all the qualities we look for in a good font: it’s legible at small sizes; it looks fantastic in large sizes and heavier weights; and it offers true italics.

2nd place

Agmena (from $91 approx.) – Crafted by a designer with a passion for beautifully printed antique books, Agmena combines digital technology with the gorgeous forms of hand-crafted Renaissance fonts to create the ideal book font.

Runners-up

Trend Hand Made (from $5) & Wishes Script (from $15) – Again, our runners-up are incredible display fonts: Trend Hand Made is the hand-drawn sibling of January’s 2nd place font, and Wishes Script is beautifully whimsical without sacrificing legibility.

May

1st Place

FF Tisa Sans (from $67 approx.) – We’re longtime fans of FontFont’s FF Tisa, so the release of a sans serif sibling six years later interested us a great deal, and Tisa Sans does not disappoint.

2nd place

Sancoale Slab Soft (from $24.75) – This softened version of Sancoale Slab makes a fantastic alternative for those who find standard slab serifs too harsh.

Runners-up

Canapé (from $49) & Gin ($22.50) – According to its creator, Canapé was based on the idea of letters with a subtly curved and slightly modulated line, and the result is warm and pleasant. Gin, on the other hand, is a stark display serif based on vintage whiskey and, obviously, gin bottles. Both are unique and appealing in their own way.

June

1st Place

Klinic Slab (name your price) – This might be our favorite font released this year. Lost Type delivered a slab serif that looks great at all weights and sizes, and it meets a host of contemporary design needs.

2nd place

Mir (from free) – The Russian word Мир (Mir) means both world and peace, and designer Julia Sysmäläinen admits to having bits of both meanings in mind while designing this typeface. Those former fans of Museo who suddenly find it too ubiquitous to use should look to Mir to meet their typographic needs.

Runners-up

Alianza (from $12.48) & Motion Picture ($59) – Alianza is incredibly versatile, offering both script and italic variants, and we find all of them visually appealing. Motion Picture, in contrast, only offers one family, but it’s a fantastic display script that calls to mind film titling cards.

July

1st Place

Niveau Grotesk (from $40) – Designed with the classical build of 19th century typefaces in mind, this font’s geometric architecture makes it stunning at large sizes, but still retains legibility at smaller sizes.

2nd place

Metro Nova (from $67 approx.) – There’s a special place in our hearts for anything released by Linotype, and with good reason. Metro Nova is a revitalized, digital version of the Metro typeface that originated in the 1930s, a sans serif that manages to straddle vintage and contemporary design eras.

Runners-up

Voyage (from $35) & Rieux (from $25) – This month’s runners-up juxtapose whimsy with pragmatism: Voyage is a lavish display script, and Rieux an even-tempered, almost industrial slab serif.

August

1st Place

FF Marselis Slab (from $62 approx.) – The slab sibling of FF Marselis, which brought us a mindful cross between geometric and humanist forms, is equally well-designed. The letter forms have been subtly altered with rounded inner corners to suit the addition of serifs, but the distinctive tear-drop forms we love from Marselis remain.

2nd place

Xenois Sans Pro (from $36 approx.) – Pronounced “zeeno-is”, this month brings us yet another family from Linotype worthy of praise. Designed with the thought of melding antique letter forms with modern characteristics, the result is a unique family of fonts (you’ll note its serif sibling made our runners-up for this month!) that look great on the page.

Runners-up

Charcuterie (from $20) & Xenois Serif Pro ($36) – Paired with the serif sibling of this month’s 2nd place winner is Laura Worthington’s Charcuterie family, which encompasses ten distinct yet related typefaces.

September

1st Place

Felice (from $35) – This elegant serif with a humanist touch was incredibly well thought-out; it looks magnificent on the page and makes a classy titling font as well.

2nd place

Quiroga Serif Pro (from $34) – Originally launched in 2007 as Quadratta, Quiroga Serif was designed to save space and still optimize legibility at medium and small sizes; it’s evolved a great deal since the Quadratta days, and we love the end result.

Runners-up

Alek (from $35) & Ella FY (from $41 approx.) – We love both of these display scripts: Alek is classy but also playful, and Ella, designed by collaborative type foundry FontYou, utilizes a host of alternate character sets to maximize versatility.

October

1st Place

Neris (from free) – Though its designer insists Neris was intended more for headlines than body copy, we love the way this sans serif looks at every size. The host of ligatures and alternate character sets makes it flexible, and we’re fans of the overall look and feel.

2nd place

Desire (from $99) – The end result of a five-year process, Desire is well worth the wait. Charles Borges de Oliveira has channeled his love of lettering into a visually stunning serif with a myriad of alternate characters for design purposes. Great for logos, headlines, and any other typographic project.

Runners-up

Radikal (from $30) & Urge Text (from $30) – These two fonts are the results of interesting typographic projects. Radikal’s designers describe it as “a geometric font dedicated to the research of purity”, and Urge Text emerged from a series of italics intended to capture both the more traditional italic feel while remaining firmly rooted to the baseline.

November

1st Place

Clear Sans (from $10) – We’re going to be honest here; the adorable (and highly amusing) minisite created for Clear Sans by its creator, Neil Summerour, is what bumped it up to the #1 place in our book. The history of its design is complicated, but the result is one of the best sans serif fonts released this year. Side note: apparently Intel released their own font under the same name in the same month (seen here), but we much prefer Summerour’s—sorry, Intel.

2nd place

Sharik Sans (from $29) – Named after the canine hero from its creator’s favorite TV series, this font was designed to exhibit a warm and gentle personality while still maintaining a subtle calligraphic touch.

Runners-up

Grenale #2 (from $24) & Dez Petranian (from $40) - Two fonts that straddle the line between display & standard, Grenale #2 is a distinctive haute couture-inspired sans serif, and Dez Petranian’s unique character style aims to recapture the fantastical spirit of storytelling.

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In Macha, Zambia, where uploads fail 75 percent of the time, a smart file sharing system can store data locally when necessary.

The rural village of Macha, Zambia, has satellite Internet connectivity, but uploads of photos and other content to sites like Facebook fail 75 percent of the time. A new file sharing prototype developed by a researchers in Zambia and California solves this problem by uploading content to a separate website served by one local PC, taking advantage of the fact that most people who ultimately view the content are right there in the village.