Tuesday, November 4, 2008

ALEC - the six hat dance


Six hat thinking is a decision making technique developed by Edward De Bono. It forces us to change our habitual ways of thinking – to think outside the square! By donning the six hats it gives more scope to our thoughts in a structured and cohesive manner. When all six hats have been on your head you can safely say all options have been exhausted and your conclusion will be rock solid.


Yesterday I was given the task of putting together a folio of my work in Craig’s class. At first I thought, ‘Oh no, this is going to be huge!’

But it soon dawned on me that if I utilise the six hats my chances of success will surely improve.


White hat – I looked through all my previous work as well as magazines and catalogues to select what I liked and disliked. The information/data has been gathered.


Green hat – Wild ideas of wacky layouts, slightly legible fonts and vast expanses of negative space ran through my mind but to choose any I would have to welcome the next hat.


Red hat – Intuition takes over and I settle on 3 different over all ‘themes’ for my folio that I think people would like and meet some sort of industry standard.


Black hat – Now it is time to sift through my work and 3 themes with a fine tooth comb and eliminate anything and everything that I don’t like or wouldn’t sit well in a magazine. Once this is out of the way it is time for…


Yellow hat – Now that the elimination stage is over I can look at all the positives of my work and start to build a rock solid portfolio.


Blue hat – As I work on my folio I realise some hats need to be revisited and it is with this blue hat on in which I make these choices.http://designprocesses.blogspot.com/

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bono_Hats

1 comment:

stacy said...

personal application shows a good understanding