Draw It is a tool to help you develop a visual representation of your idea – as the saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words!’Participants do not need to be great artists for drawing to be a highly useful tool, especially when language barriers might make it difficult to articulate ideas clearly in writing. As IDEO suggest, drawing can help “organize thoughts visually and generally spur ideas and conversation in a different way than talking.”

Storyboarding can be used to create a visual narrative across 6-8 pictures (think of it like a cartoon). This is particularly useful for service design or for imagining each stage of a users’ journey in their interaction with a problem and an envisaged solution. As Mozilla’s Open Innovation Toolkit suggests, Storyboarding can be used to make early ideas concrete, help with feature articulation, and provide a reality check on how a solution might function.

Design the Box is a tool that aims to get you thinking about how a solution might look and feel if it was packaged in a box. This can be done for services as well as products and is a way to help you focus on the most appealing and important elements of your solution. The design of the box itself can be used to gain feedback on the different elements of the concept.

If you are designing a service or process it can be a useful exercise to role play or simulate the way in which users would interact with your service, thinking through where they would be and how they would behave. This can be a fun exercise, but try to make it as realistic as possible, involving potential users and target groups if this is feasible and appropriate. Nesta and IDEO’s Designing for Public Services toolkit provides two similar exercises based on roleplaying (p59) and simulation (p60).

If you are designing a service or a process it is a good idea to map out the key activities and touchpoints from the first interaction to the end of the journey in order to add detail to your concept. The Service Design Toolkit provides a useful Service Design Concept tool to work through each activity and touchpoint; this can be completed after using roleplaying and simulation to provide inspiration.

Throughout all your activities to date, you will have generated and captured lots of ideas for a potential solution. Creating Concepts is about capturing the richness of your ideas in one place, bringing them together in a ‘Concept Capture Sheet’ to provide a single overview of the various aspects of your concept. Nesta and IDEO’s Designing for Public Services toolkit provides further guidance on creating a concept on p47.