Live, collaborative ideation is our secret weapon for rapid and cost-effective innovation.
(Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are offering virtual ideation only at this time.)
To support projects on aggressive timelines and lean budgets, our team has explored many ways to innovate and visualize quickly and cost-effectively. For our clients, live concept creation and visualization is one of our most powerful and often-requested tools. To make these capabilities affordable and accessible, we’ve bundled them into a quick, cost-effective, and easy-to-book service called the Ideation Session.
What is an Ideation session?
An Ideation Session is a collaborative meeting during which members of Pixel and Timber collaborate with your team — in-person or virtually — to innovate and illustrate live with your team. During this moderated session, our team brings out and visualizes your best ideas and adds our own — from the perspectives of experienced product developers who have created thousands of concepts for new consumer products, medical devices and structural packaging solutions. The output invariably includes dozens to hundreds of ideas — owned 100% by your organization — and a team that’s primed for collaboration and innovation. The average ideation session consists of:
2 - 4 Hours (per day)
Dozens to hundreds of illustrated concepts
Summary Report
Up to 20 participants
Led by Experienced Product Developers
Average 4 : 1 ratio (participants to designers)
All Intellectual Property Owned By CLient
3 TIERS OF SERVICE
To make innovation accessible and affordable for all clients, we’ve bundled our live ideation services into three tiers, based on your feedback. The three tiers below are crafted to suit the needs of any project — from team-building initiatives to spark innovation within your corporation to the creation of realistic 3D outputs to provide a foundation of your product-based startup. Use the button below to speak to a member of our team or to reserve your session.
Contact Hours: 2 - 4
Duration: < 2 Days
Output: 2D
Perfect for IP generation; creative, cross-disciplinary team-building; technical problem solving; and generating a breadth of new ideas at the earliest stage of a new product development (NPD) project — all with a minimal time commitment.
A live, guided concept ideation session led by one or more designers
Dozens to hundreds of detailed black and white hand illustrations
Professional photography of the session, including a time lapse video
A spreadsheet with an illustration and description of each concept
A digital deck consolidating all illustrations into a single, shareable format
Contact Hours: 2 - 6
Duration: < 4 Days
Output: 2D
A great choice for streamlining the early phases of a new NPD project and bringing together the best minds in your organization for collaboration and cross-pollination with tangible and actionable outputs.
A live, guided concept ideation session led by one or more designers
Dozens to hundreds of detailed black and white hand illustrations
Professional photography of the session, including a time lapse video
A spreadsheet with an illustration and description of each concept
A digital deck consolidating all outputs into a single, shareable format
Loose (transparent PNG) copies of each illustration (for addition to other decks)
A weighted Criteria-based Matrix (CBM), based on stated project goals
Refined illustrations of the leading concepts
Contact Hours: 2 - 8
Duration: < 2 Weeks
Output: 3D
A powerful tool to rapidly produce a realistic embodiment of a device for evaluation by prospective users, investors or internal stakeholders before committing to a complete NPD program. Also great for conceptual and/or promotional products.
A live, guided concept ideation session led by one or more designers
Dozens to hundreds of detailed black and white hand illustrations
Professional photography of the session, including a time lapse video
A spreadsheet with an illustration and description of each concept
A digital deck consolidating all outputs into a single, shareable format
Loose (transparent PNG) copies of all illustrations and renderings (for addition to other decks)
A weighted Criteria-based Matrix (CBM), based on stated project goals
Refined illustrations of the leading concepts
Second CBM to identify a single concept
A 3D CAD model of a single concept
Photorealistic 3D renderings
360° turntable animation
Customers are saying…
“I’ve used Pixel and Timber in technical brainstorming sessions over the past 10 years. Having someone there with technical knowledge and the ability to sketch a concept in real time greatly increases the quality of the output over the hand waving and chicken scratches I have gotten without them. If you are talking one-on-one with a colleague about a problem you are chewing on that is one thing, but if you are getting together a team to ideate on a problem, do yourself a favor and bring in someone to help capture the ideas.”
“David is a superb designer & thinker... he led an exploration of tooth whitening devices for Colgate-Palmolive Company. He provided a broad set of solutions with unique experiences and use. Some were provocative. All conceptual ideas were based on sound research and grounded in conceptual technical possibilities. In simple words, no stone was left unturned. ”
“He brought creativity and innovative thinking to an iconic brand and package which had several design constraints. He and his team did a very wide exploration at the start that gave us much to think about. He also used some creative tools and processes that I found really useful.”
Frequently Asked Questions
How does this differ from Brainstorming?
Unlike a traditional agency-led brainstorming session, our ideation sessions are fast, affordable and yield actionable concepts. These are the advantages of the session itself — made possible by Pixel and Timber’s small size, low overhead, and long product development experience. But the real power of a Pixel and Timber ideation session comes after the session has ended; it comes in the form of weeks saved by trading off-line concept design and reporting for on-the-spot collaboration and design refinement.
Though they yield many high level concepts, conventional brainstorms are often simply an outpouring of ideas facilitated by an illustrator. These low fidelity ideas are then refined over a period of weeks and consolidated into a report. This conventional process yields many billable hours for your agency but rarely actionable concepts.
Our ideation sessions can yield large or small numbers of concepts, depending on the needs of the project. By collaborating and refining ideas live, during a session, and aligning on just a few to detail further, our team saves the weeks agencies spend executing concept designs back at their offices and producing reports.
There are many benefits to live brainstorming, but yielding actionable concepts isn’t generally one of them. Pixel and Timber’s ideation sessions share many of the tools of brainstorming, but unlike a conventional agency-led brainstorm, our ideation sessions are used to generate targeted innovations around specific technical problems (e.g. end effector articulation and locking) or a range of concepts around an open-ended problem (e.g. reducing the ecological footprint of a product or package) — all informed by our product development and design-for-manufacturing (DFM) experience.
Even our simplest ideation sessions benefit from the technical knowledge of the P&T staff to yield concepts that incorporate DFM and other technical details that are generally absent from agency-led brainstorms. Our higher tier sessions include formal, criteria-based feature assessment and live, on-site refinement. During these sessions, our team works alongside key stakeholders from your organization to implement their feedback in live, back-and-forth collaboration and illustration. This ensures that the output of even this first session has already received a round of stakeholder-led refinement before any investment is made in illustration or reporting. This collaborative process eliminates weeks of work a conventional agency would spend combining and illustrating concepts in a vacuum — uninformed by the knowledge and experience of your staff.
Conventional Brainstorm
Cross-pollination between different areas of an organization
Injection of new ideas from an outside resource
Unlocking the creative horsepower of an organization
Fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation
Pixel & Timber Ideation Session
Cross-pollination between different areas of an organization
Injection of new ideas from an outside resource
Unlocking the creative horsepower of an organization
Fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation
Incorporating DFM and other technical aspects into the session
Rigorously balancing the needs of many stakeholders based on pre-established criteria
Collaboratively incorporating the feedback of your team and illustrating refined ideas on-the-spot
Generating refined concepts for the phases that follow
How long does it take?
Most ideation sessions last from 2 - 4 contact hours. Longer sessions can last an entire day or be broken into multiple days at one or more locations. Our team travels to your location armed with a kit of tools necessary to facilitate a live session and the experience of many past sessions to help guide the day’s activities and maintain an appropriate level of energy in the room. Often, these sessions are preceded by a presentation on a topic area relevant to the project (e.g. sustainable design, holistic design, et al.).
T1
2 - 4 Hours of collaborative ideation
Outputs delivered by the end of the next business day
T2
2 - 4 hours of broad ideation
< 2 hours of distillation
2D Outputs often delivered in less than 3 business days
T3
2 - 4 hours of broad ideation
< 2 hours of distillation (2D)
< 2 hours of distillation (3D)
3D outputs delivered in less than 2 weeks
How do you handle IP?
Every idea produced during a Pixel and Timber ideation session is owned 100% by our clients. Our objective is to help your organization create and protect the very best ideas our combined team can conceive of; it is not to compete against you. Assigning all IP that comes from a session to the client who books it is fundamental to this work.
The outputs of our T1 or T2 ideation sessions are often used as the foundations of Provisional Patent Applications (PPA). For some clients, an ideation session is their first step in creating a novel technology. For others, these sessions are used to generate additional embodiments around a core technology they’ve already conceived of.
What do the sketches look like?
The selected tier determines the outputs of a session. (For more information about the inputs and outputs of each session, please explore the Learn More buttons above.) The images below show example outputs for each of the three tiers. For comparison, these examples all relate to a single concept taken from a single project. For more information about this project and its outputs, please check out its case study, here.
T1
Quick, line drawings created live during a session. These drawings are executed on a standing white board or pad or on 8.5 X 11 copy paper. These drawings illustrate complete concepts or individual features.
Perfect for:
Documenting and conveying ideas internally at the beginning of a new NPD project
Fleshing out additional product embodiments for a PPA
Fostering collaboration and innovation within your organization
T2
Incorporating basic shading (and sometimes color), these drawings are executed off-site on just a few of the leading concepts from the live session. Concepts often combine features from multiple T1 illustrations.
Perfect for:
Consolidating features into a small number of refined concepts
Conveying the details of each concept
Providing illustrations that can be used for evaluation by customers or other external stakeholders
T3
The outputs of a T3 session are 3D. This additional dimension adds color, form and material realism through photorealistic renderings. DFM and other details are often included in this work.
Perfect for:
Generating a large number of realistic color, material, and finish options
Showing additional views
Testing highly realistic concepts with customers or other external stakeholders
Rapidly providing the foundation of an investor pitch deck for a new product
Cost modeling
Prototypes
Animations
