Why?

When it is hard to develop an initial idea into an elegant solution, a morphological technique such as scamper can help.

How?

Scamper is an acronym you can use to create variants of your ideas by Selecting, Combining, Adapting, Modifying, Put to different uses, Eliminating and Reversing. Then iterate; so apply these transformations to the variants you created as well.

Ingredients

• Pen and paper.
• A willingness to create and evaluate many variants of your initial idea.
• The Thinker toy’s scamper card set can be helpful.

In practice

Scamper is particularly useful when you try to design the functionality and interaction of a product.

Useful resources

• The Delft Design Guide spends a couple of pages about SCAMPER (122-123). A more extensive description can be found in ThinkerToys (Michalko) p72-110. There is also a SCAMPER card set by the same author called ThinkPack http://www.amazon.com/Thinkpak-Brainstorming-Card-Michael-Michalko/dp/1580087728