If there's one thing that the ol' double diamond engrained in me, is that there's value in both divergent and convergent thinking.

Lately, I've been thinking about my design and creative process. And like many, I've been dipping my toes into the AI waters, experimenting with how I can use it to improve my process.

I've been thinking about how I'm starting to use AI for a bunch of different use cases, and wanted to share how it is helping me with both the acts of diverging and converging.

What is the difference between convergent and divergent thinking?

As a reminder, Divergent thinking is the process of exploring ideas without filtering out any bad ones. What's the right problem to solve? What's the right solution to that problem? This is the part of the process where we get loose through creative ideation and brainstorming. The part that should generate a wide range of ideas and questions, coming at them from different perspectives.

Convergent thinking, on the other hand - is the bit where we need to get a bit serious. It's about shortlisting, evaluating, and refining our problem definition, and our solution to said problem. It's a sense check of what we generated in the divergent phase. It's the refining, selecting the best ideas and combining them to come up with the best solution to the most pertinent problem. Honing in - with laserlike like focus - on building the right thing, and building the thing right.

Truth is - we need both types of thinking to come up with breakthrough products. We often think that creativity and innovation is the result of wild, divergent ideas, no matter how crazy. But it's just as important to narrowing down, and focus on the right idea.

I'm starting to realize that AI can be our co-pilot across both stages of the creative process. Here's how I'm experimenting with AI right now.

AI for divergent thinking

AI shines at rapidly generating volumes of creative ideas and directions to consider.

I've been experimenting with a few LLMs (like ChatGPT, and more recently Claude AI) for:

Brainstorming

I'm fascinated by the potential of AI to help with a brainstorm. If I need help drafting ideas for a workshop, a list of design principles, or some considerations for a new product feature - I'm now in the habit of turning to AI first.

It's mind bogglingly handy to generate a large number of initial ideas or concepts based on a prompt, or even a design challenge. Provide your LLM with background on a project, and let it rapidly develop a tonne of preliminary ideas that you can choose or refine.

Writing

Part of me wanting to start a blog again, is because I'm experimenting how to use AI to help me become a better writer.

No, I don't cut and paste anything into directly into a blog post or presentation. But yes, I do use Chat GPT to help me generate new ideas and thoughts related to a topic, and structure my writing into something that's (hopefully) more coherent.

Image generation

Midjourney is currently my tool of choice to generate images and visual direction. Mostly for fun at this point. I've spent more time playing with MidJourney than anything else.

Professionally, I'm starting to create AI generated art for blog post images, slide decks, and illustrations. I can see myself using this more and more at work.

Research

More and more I'm turning to Perplexity over Google to uncover relevant articles, and posts. Sometimes I'll have an idea, even a half idea and a chatbot can help me to think differently about a problem, or potential solution.

Spit-balling

It feels weird at first, but I'm increasingly just "chatting", or bouncing ideas with LLMs during my day to sharpen ideas or thinking. Try asking an AI chatbot open-ended questions to explore a problem space, or solution area. It's wild! A lot like having an assistant on my shoulder.

AI for convergent thinking

Right now, AI is probably most famous for how it helps with divergent thinking. But I think there is plenty of opportunity in using AI to help help you focus in on the right problems and solutions through convergence. This is how I've been using it so far:

Synthesis

Some (but not all) AI tools are great at summarizing information. I've started thinking about how I can pull in research findings, user feedback, articles and trends to help summarize key insights and findings, and reveal user needs, pain points and patterns.

Defining the Problem

I'm a proponent of clearly articulated problem, but it's usually something I agonize over. Recently I've been workshopping and refined problem statements with ChatGPT. I find that it helps to sharpen my thinking.

Product Management

The product manager in me loves the convergent phase. Problem is. I'm not a product manager.

So I sometimes use ChatGPT to be my product management assistant. To help me sense check my ideas, prioritise my work, and determine the actionable next steps of everything that I'm doing.

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As the old saying goes "*AI won't take your job, It's somebody using AI that will take your job.*"

Well, we're not at that point yet. But it is clear, designers who start to bake AI into their process will be at a clear advantage to those who don't.

So tell me, how are you using AI to augment your design process? I'd love to hear the different ways in which AI is helping you become a better designer.