Before the AI: The Brainstorming Fundamentals

Why these 80-year-old principles are more relevant than ever.

Jul 10, 2025

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a series on how AI can support different parts of design process — from brainstorming to synthesizing to prototyping.

We’re starting with brainstorming, but before jumping into AI tools, techniques, and tactics, I want to use this week’s and next week’s post to revisit the basics.

Just the fundamentals: mindset, principles, and techniques, before we look at how AI can augment it.

The term brainstorming was first coined by a leader in advertising in the 1940s, Alex Osborn. In Your Creative Power, the book where he introduced the concept, he drew from ten years of research, interviewing hundreds of people and reading widely across books, speeches, and articles to explore how imagination and creativity work.1 He shares mindsets and a set of principles that, to me, still feel relevant today.

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1. Defer judgment

Osborn believed that everyone is creative — creativity isn’t a rare gift. He observed that the reason people often struggle to come up with ideas or feel frozen is because they’re worried about judgment. But when people are encouraged to throw out lots of ideas without being judged, they naturally become more creative. And that became one of his ground rules for creative thinking: defer judgment to a separate session.

Art students practice something similar. To sharpen their observation and hand–eye coordination, they draw without looking at the paper, a technique called blind contour drawing. This exercise helps them separate doing from judging. It’s especially useful when they feel stuck or discouraged about their skills, a way to loosen up, embrace imperfections, and just keep going.

Sound familiar of separating doing and judging? Designers know this as part of the double diamond: first, diverge (generate as many ideas as possible), then converge (critically examine ideas, narrow them down, and select one).

2. Go for quantity

The next principle of brainstorming from Osborn is: have a lot of ideas. Like, a lot. Go for quantity. He believed the best ideas come from having many ideas — not from chasing one perfect thought. Quantity first. Quality comes later.

Adam Grant, in his book Originals, states that quantity is the most predictable path to quality.2 By producing a large number of ideas (many of which will be novel), you increase your chances of stumbling upon the few that are truly high-quality or effective.

Although the book talks a lot about original ideas, he explains that being original doesn’t require being first. The goal isn’t novelty for its own sake, but novelty that brings an advantage or improvement. And the more ideas you have, the greater the chance you’ll land on those novel ones. And this is backed by science.

Psychologist Dean Simonton, who spent his career studying creative productivity, found that creative geniuses like Beethoven, Edison, and Picasso weren’t necessarily better than their peers. They just produced a much greater volume of work. More variation, more shots at originality, a greater work.

The company Upworthy, known for making content go viral, has a rule that requires generating at least twenty-five headline ideas. Their experience shows that early ideas are often conventional, and it’s only after exploring a lot of possibilities that truly original ideas take shape.

In the same spirit, Crazy 8s is a technique popularized by Jake Knapp in his Design Sprint. It’s basically about aiming for quantity. Have 8 ideas within 8 minutes. The time limit urges us to not think much and not criticize a lot. Just generate ideas.3

3. Welcome wild ideas

Are you telling yourself not to reinvent the wheel? Not to go off the beaten path? To keep things low-effort and easy to implement? While it’s good to be realistic, it won’t hurt to have wild, out-of-the-box ideas in the early stage.

To Osborn, it’s easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a boring one. Bland ideas don’t give you much to work with. Wild or extreme ideas spark possibilities.

Think of it like sculpting: Start with a small, plain block and it’s difficult to stretch it into something grand. Start with a big, bold one and you can carve it down. You can always scale them back, simplify, or shape them to fit your constraints.

So when you have different variations of ideas, from the normal to the wild, from the familiar to the novel, they become good raw material. You can mix them, build on them, or blend parts together. That’s exactly the point of Osborn’s last principle…

4. Build and Remix

Combining and improving ideas can be the path to producing original work, according to Grant in Originals. The most promising original ideas often begin with something novel, then weave in elements of familiarity.

For example, the creative team behind The Lion King pitched their animated movie by reframing it as “Hamlet with lions.” This dose of familiarity helped executives connect the new concept to a classic.

Just like designers, we can add novelty to familiar ideas or familiar patterns. It’s not always about having a fully original idea, sometimes, originality comes from how you tweak, reframe, or combine what’s already there.

To recap, here are the brainstorming principles inspired by the father of the technique, Alex Osborn: