Idea Generation part 2
“How Might We…” Statements
How might we develop a way to safely access directions, music, texting services, and calling services while driving?
How might we develop versatile ways to hold or carry phones of different shapes and sizes?
Set Up
My participants, their years in school, their majors, and the color marker that they used for the brainstorming session are listed below.
Austin
- 6th year architecture student
- red marker
Charley
- 3rd year aerospace engineering transfer student
- purple marker
Charlie
- 2nd year computer science student
- dark blue marker
Logan
- 3rd year mechanical engineering student
- green marker
The session was held at Logan and Charlie’s apartment on Sunday, November 3rd at 11:30am.
Here are my notes from before the session began, documenting my general plan and time schedule.



Warm Up
For my original warm up activity, I thought about other types of improvisation, specifically improvisation in jazz music. Since all of my participants and I have played improvisational jazz at some point or another, I decided that we would listen to a piece of improvisational jazz and discuss improv in music. I chose to do this to see if music sparks any similar effect on creativity as improv games do, and I also wanted to open my participants up a little more by introducing something that they are comfortable with.
I played the song Autumn Leaves by Chet Baker.
I thought that this was a very interesting activity and my participants seemed to enjoy talking about music before brainstorming. A lot of the conversation stayed pretty specific to music — there was a lot of talk on playing within the right scale, practicing different riffs beforehand, connecting with the rhythm section, adding rests to the solo, and balancing. I was able to connect some of the responses back to improv comedy and product design. For example, Logan mentioned how most jazz musicians will practice a short melody, or riff, for months and months before they include that riff in their solo improved performance. Similarly, any ideas that come up in a brainstorming session take a long time to develop, change, and create. Along with this, Charlie talked about how a piano player was brought into his jazz class earlier that week to talk about how to improvise and to practice a little with them — which is very similar to how the improv group came into our class and taught us improv basics. We also all discussed how the soloist has to have a good connection with the rhythm section, and how everyone playing has to work together to both boost the soloist and keep the other musicians engaged and heard. I thought that this was a similar principle to the “yes, and” idea that is popular in improv comedy.
Overall, I thought this was a good exercise for the participants that I had, and I definitely think it is a good thing to do with musicians who have improv experience — the activity might fall flat with those who aren’t jazz musicians or aren’t musicians at all.
Brainstorm Session
To begin the session, we played the improvisation game “look at me” and then continued with the improvisational jazz listening activity. I then explained how the brainstorming session would work, making sure to explain that everyone should draw, label, and present every idea that they have. I then introduced the general theme of phone car mounts, which was enough to get everyone to begin thinking of ideas. About seven minutes into this first prompt, I noticed a bit of a lull, so I gave everyone brownies.

I then introduced the first “How might we…” statement, which again was enough to keep everyone coming up with new ideas. When people became stumped for new ideas, I encouraged them to think about why people drive in the first place, since the first statement has to do with driving. Next, I introduced the second “How might we…” statement, and I encouraged them to think about why people have phones in the first place. Towards the end of the session, I passed out little cards that had random words written on them to see if that could spark any ideas. While this did help people to come up with ideas, the ideas were mostly meant to be jokes and ended up being seen as the some of the worst ideas after labeling and voting.

We moved on to silently moving the ideas into groups, which went on for about five minutes and could have gone on for much longer.


After that, we all discussed the groups and thought of labels that best described them. We then went around and drew a dot on any idea that we thought was good, relatively feasible, or creative.

After everyone left, I reorganized each group to be a little more uniform so that documenting would be cleaner. All the ideas in their labelled groups and with their votes on them are pictured below.










The total number of ideas is 63. The Ideas per Minute (IPM) per person is 0.42. This was calculated by dividing the total number of ideas by the number of minutes spent brainstorming and the number of people participating.
The ideas with the most votes, along with who made them, are pictured and listed below.










Top 10 Ideas
Below are my top 10 final ideas, along with which blog post they originally came from.










