Article summary
Welcome to our series on Design Thinking methods and activities. You’ll find a full list of posts in this series at the end of the page.
Rose, Bud, Thorn may be the most commonly used Design Thinking activity at Atomic due to its versatility and ease of use.
Rose, Bud, Thorn
| Primary Goal | To understand what’s working, what’s not, and areas of opportunity |
| When To Use | At any point in a project (thus the beauty of this exercise) |
| Time Required | 30 minutes – 1 hour |
| Number of Participants | 1 facilitator and 2-5+ participants |
| Who Should Participate? | The core team or any group of team members engaging in the project (think designers, developers, marketers, business strategists, or preferably a mix of everyone) |
| Supplies | Large chunk of wall space, pink/blue/green Post-it notes, and Sharpie markers |
First let’s begin with some definitions:
a. Rose = something that is working well or something positive
b. Bud = an area of opportunity or idea yet to be explored
c. Thorn = something that isn’t working or something negative
1. How It Works
There are a couple of ways to use this method. One approach is to use sticky notes as labels to tag categories or single items in a data set. Using pink notes for rose concepts, green notes for buds, and blue notes for thorns works well.
At Atomic, we’ve used this method when creating an experience diagram to annotate breakpoints, opportunities for improvements, and things we liked that we didn’t want to accidentally break during the process of redesigning and improving something else. It’s an extremely rich and useful representation of the day-in-a-life type artifact.
Here’s an example of how Lyft might use this activity for their app.
Here are a few other ways you can structure this activity:
ROSE
- What was the highlight of your day?
- How have you been successful?
- What did you like?
- Describe efforts that blossomed.
- What are you most proud of?
THORN
- What went wrong during your day?
- What was most stressful?
- Identify causes of difficulty
- What impeded your efforts?
- What makes you fearful?
- Did you experience pain points in the process?
BUD
- What are you looking forward to tomorrow?
- Describe opportunities that energize you
- What possibilities need growth and nurturing?
2. Reflection
If all goes well, themes will start emerging, and you can start to cluster them by affinity (Affinity Mapping). The team will immediately see which areas are more problematic, promising, and than others. You can synthesize this information in a Google Drawing document or Mural so that teammates can continue to add thoughts and evolve the activity.
Atomic’s Design Thinking Toolkit
- What Is Design Thinking?
- Your Design Thinking Supply List
- Activity 1 – The Love/Breakup Letter
- Activity 2 – Story Mapping
- Activity 3 – P.O.E.M.S.
- Activity 4 – Start Your Day
- Activity 5 – Remember the Future
- Activity 6 – Card Sorting
- Activity 7 – Competitors/Complementors Map
- Activity 8 – Difficulty & Importance Matrix
- Activity 9 – Rose, Bud, Thorn
- Activity 10 – Affinity Mapping
- Activity 11 – Speed Boat
- Activity 12 – Visualize The Vote
- Activity 13 – Hopes & Fears
- Activity 14 – I Like, I Wish, What If
- Activity 15 – How to Make Toast
- Activity 16 – How Might We…?
- Activity 17 – Alter Egos
- Activity 18 – What’s On Your Radar?
- Activity 19 – The Perfect Morning
- Activity 20 – 2×3
- Activity 21 – How Can I Help…?
- Activity 22 – Cover Story
- Activity 23 – Crazy 8s
- Activity 24 – Abstraction Ladder
- Activity 25 – Empathy Map
- Activity 26 – Worse Possible Idea
- Activity 27 – Pre-Project Survey
- Activity 28 – The Powers of Ten
- Activity 29 – SCAMPER
- Activity 30 – Design Studio
- Activity 31 – Forced Connections
This is an updated version of a post originally published in April 2018.