IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design

Great tool to help students (and myself) look at problems from different perspectives and angles. Great for break-out sessions with my students.

The cards are very useful. They give you different approaches to any project. They are good if you working alone, in a creative group or doing research with clients or costumers. For designers I strongly recommend

Another great creative tool from the people at IDEO. These concept cards are a great tool for inspiration and creative guidance.

Some excellent ideas to approach problems or opportunities with a set of different perspectives. Each card represents an idea, gives a brief explanation and 1 or 2 lines on how it was used in an ideo project. If you are a creative person and understand how the different ideas could be applied, the deck can be very valuable. However, you basically have to develop your own methodology from the core idea that they suggest. Was it worth the purchase? Maybe, the ideas are very handy. Is it very useful? Only if you put in some effort developing your own methodology and doing some additional research. It's pretty sparse. Watch the w5 show from the 1990s where ideo was profiled. You will get a lot out of that video.

Way, way expensive ... but such a cool idea and a very cool set. Because it is so expensive, it's hard to just put in your pocket and carry and use it everywhere. Afraid to lose it. That sorta defeats the purpose of a deck of cards - to sit neatly in my office as an exhibit piece.

Love these!

I ordered a set of these, and was surprised to only receive a set of cardboard cards. There is no book of instructions on different ways to use them. The cards themselves have a few good ideas, but nothing that can't be found with a few minutes of google searching the topic. Half of the topics are just standard techniques out of the BABOK. Buy a book on agile requirements elicitation instead; Kai Yang's text on the Voice of the Customer is a great read. They say a sucker is born every minute; looks like I'm the sucker. Learn from my mistake and don't order these: Amazon has plenty of other texts on the subject that are of far greater value.

Samples of an idea for a class assignment, but a bit too design oriented. Not quite open ended enough. Very nice starting point. Something to build on for my design and drawing classes.