{"id":22800,"date":"2025-01-22T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/?p=22800"},"modified":"2025-05-12T10:43:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T14:43:32","slug":"the-power-of-paper-brainstorming-collaborating-with-sticky-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/the-power-of-paper-brainstorming-collaborating-with-sticky-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Paper: Brainstorming & Collaborating with Sticky Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sticky notes are powerfully simple tools that help us ideate, iterate, and imagine. In this blog, Hayley discusses her experiences using sticky notes to facilitate brainstorming and collaboration at the Innovation Hub. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Hayley Park, Senior Project Assistant & Communications Lead, Honours Bachelor of Arts, Communications, Culture, Information & Technology<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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If you\u2019re anything like me \u2013 inspiration can strike at any moment. That\u2019s why, when an idea pops into my head, it\u2019s become a force of habit for me to reach for the nearest writing utensil and pad of sticky notes. With sticky notes, I can get my thoughts onto paper as they\u2019re developing. Sticky notes are so simple yet have infinite uses, such as for planning, brainstorming, collaborating, doodling, reminders, to-dos, and more. I\u2019ve always found it amazing how just a little square of paper can be so powerful in facilitating creative processes. So, what is it about these mini canvases that are so impactful in design thinking? In my experience, it comes down to three key functions: ideating, iterating and imagining! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideate: The Ease of Brainstorming <\/h2>\n\n\n
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There\u2019s an exercise I love doing with sticky notes where you have a certain amount of time to get out as many ideas as possible \u2013 and every idea gets its own sticky note. There aren\u2019t rules, just an emphasis on rapid brainstorming. As a thought pops into your head, you write it down. It\u2019s wonderful to watch teams of thinkers tear sticky note after sticky note from their pad with excitement. At the end, you get to look at just how many ideas have been generated in a short amount of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sticky notes are great for quick idea dumping and allow us to note down early thoughts and questions for further exploration. I find that the small nature of stickies, coupled with the sense of impermanence, makes it easier to use them without self-restriction. They get us comfortable with being imperfect, quick, and even sloppy \u2013 but that helps us get ideas out with minimal pressure for it to be amazing right away. In the past, when I\u2019ve worked with high-quality materials, I often focused too much on the initial work being perfect or looking beautiful to live up to the expectations of the medium. Instead, sticky notes really help me get unstuck and minimize expectations of what an idea should look like in its earliest conception.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iterate: Collaborate & Problem-Solve Together <\/h2>\n\n\n
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Recently, while prototyping the information architecture for a website we\u2019re designing in partnership with the Family Care Office, our User Experience Design team used sticky notes on a big white board to organize content into categories. Using sticky notes for this exercise allowed us to evaluate where each concept was placed, group stickies together, move them between categories, take some away and add new ones. In a short amount of time, we were able to work together to finalize the website\u2019s information architecture. Everyone had a chance to contribute, jumping in to move pieces of the puzzle around.  These kinds of collaborative activities show what amazingly simple tools sticky notes can be for group collaboration, and how they allow teams to collaborate and problem-solve together in real-time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 A key quality of sticky notes is (of course), their sticky nature \u2013 allowing them to be moved around and repositioned as needed. Sticky notes help us re-organize ideas and concepts as plans continuously evolve. In that sense, sticky notes are very helpful in the iteration process of design thinking. Flexible and iterative by design, sticky notes allow us to experiment with ease and remind us that no idea is concrete or sacred.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine: A Starting Point for Greater Things <\/h2>\n\n\n
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As a graphic designer, I\u2019m often sketching ideas for icons and visuals for our reports and promotional materials. I remember making a quick doodle of an icon on a sticky note and bringing it over to a colleague to ask, \u201cwhat do you think of this?\u201d Later, the sketch was transformed into a fully developed, digitized icon for one of our design research projects.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve learned that sticky notes are blank canvases for just about anything: they\u2019re starting points for all that we can imagine. From my perspective, every idea on a sticky note holds so much potential for future iteration, development and expansion. Sticky notes show us that every idea is a basis for another, even greater idea. It\u2019s fascinating to think about how a quick jot on a sticky note can become the foundation for amazing final products! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embrace the Analog <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If sticky notes have taught me one thing \u2013 it\u2019s to embrace the analog. It’s easy to be drawn to flashy, new products to aid our innovation process, and these products have an important place. Yet, we often forget that there’s great power and value in the simplest materials. Being flexible and adaptable in the design thinking processes begins with the tools that we use. I think you\u2019ll be impressed with what you can accomplish, both with yourself and with others, when you welcome sticky notes and other analog tools into your creative processes.  A sticky note is so much more than a sheet of paper \u2013 every sheet is an open playground to explore wild ideas! What will you explore first? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Sticky notes are powerfully simple tools that help us ideate, iterate, and imagine. In this blog, Hayley discusses her experiences using sticky notes to facilitate brainstorming and collaboration at the Innovation Hub. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Hayley Park, Senior Project Assistant & Communications Lead, Honours Bachelor of Arts, Communications, Culture, Information & Technology<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading “The Power of Paper: Brainstorming & Collaborating with Sticky Notes”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":478,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[10878],"tags":[34735],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22800"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/478"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22800"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24338,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22800\/revisions\/24338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/innovationhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}