How to design something that you have not seen before: A systematic innovation approach

In the School for Creative Thinker Level 1 Workshop, I was given the task to design an extra-terrestrial (E.T.). Mr. Anatoly suggested the use of a design tool that consists of several possible attributes of E.T. (e.g. size, mass, level of intellectual, method of communication, senses, mobility, emotion). By thinking through the features of the E.T., we could imagine the look-and-feel of the E.T. systematically.

In fact, I have been using similar approach when I teach Character Design courses. In my course, I would ask student to fill in the Character Profile form that consists of a long list of W questions that my students must answer before visualization how their character would look like. I learned how to use this tool in 2002, when I was an undergraduate student at Multimedia University.