Issue 23: Solo brainstorming doesn't work — unless you give AI something to push back on.
Ideation without a team is flat. Here’s the SCAMPER prompt that works, the argument prompt that’s actually the useful one, and why the friction is the whole point.
Happy Monday, designers!
Hope you enjoyed your weekend. Mine was full of family time and cycling along the beach in Zeeland, Netherlands and it was probably one of the best weekends we had this year. And of course, happy Mother’s Day to those, who celebrated it yesterday!
Let’s start from where we left things off last time. In the previous issue we have discussed several HMWs, while solving the problem of designers struggling to build or maintain their portfolio.
The HMW I walked into Ideate with: How might we help designers close the gap between their imagined portfolio and their real one?
I also had the secondary one in my pocket: How might we reduce the stakes of opening an old project file?
I blocked 90 minutes to run the session just between me and Claude. This is how it went.
Why solo ideation stalls
In a team session, quantity comes from momentum. Someone says something half-formed, someone else extends it, a third person breaks it in an interesting direction. The ideas compound. The obvious ones get spent quickly because the group moves past them.
Alone, you get the obvious ideas, and then you get stuck. The notebook fills with variations on the same concept. You’re not ideating — you’re iterating on your first idea.
The fix isn’t prompting AI for ideas. AI generates too-tidy concepts, too quickly, without enough specificity to build from. What you want from AI in the Ideate phase is resistance — something to argue against, something that forces you to defend your assumptions.
The tool chain here is different from the synthesis phases. It’s a back-and-forth. The friction is the product.
1. The SCAMPER pass
SCAMPER is the fastest way to spend the obvious ideas — to exhaust the surface-level variations before you go deeper. Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, Reverse.
Run it on your strongest early concept. For the portfolio study, mine was: a “draft layer” that lives between a designer’s private work and their published portfolio — a staging area where things can exist half-finished without pressure to publish.
Tool chain: Cowork → run prompt → use the output as a stimulus list, not a solution list. Nothing from this prompt ships. It’s the warm-up.
