Brainstorming

Rachel Bodine

4 min readOct 17, 2018

Individual Idea Generation

How might we make it safer and more convenient for bikers to use technology while biking?

New Warm-up Game

Draw-a-Monster

A larger group is split into groups of 3–5. Each person is assigned a body part: head, neck and top half of the torso, bottom half of the torso, legs, or tail (for less than 5 players body parts can be combined). The players then have 3 minutes to draw their masterpiece without looking at what the other players are drawing. At the end of the 3 minutes, the pieces of the monster’s body are pieced together. As a group, the players then make up a name for their newly created creature.

Session Organization

For my brainstorming session, I had a total of seven participants come, however, two had to leave early, and two had to come late. At any one time, I had four to five participants working on brainstorming.

Inga: a student at the University of Minnesota who lives with her family off campus.
Eleanor: a student at the University of Minnesota in the College of Science and Engineering.
Eirelice: a student at the University of Minnesota studying business.
Emma: a student at the University of Minnesota studying psychology.
Ricky: a student at the University of Minnesota desiring to study music or writing.
Julia: a student at the University of Minnesota living in a house with other students off campus.
Brandon: a student at the University of Minnesota interested in politics.

I conducted the brainstorming session in a lounge in the Sanford Hall dorm building. The idea sketches were taped onto a large white wall. I provided cookies and candy for everyone to enjoy while brainstorming. As an introduction, everyone shared their name and major or areas of interested, we then played “Draw-a-Monster.” Over the time-span of 40 minutes, 50 ideas were generated for an IPM of 1.25.

Sorting and Voting

For the voting process, each person got three orange sticky taps and three green sticky tabs. The orange tabs denoted creative ideas while the green ones denoted interesting ideas.

For the sorting portion of the brainstorming session, the brainstormed ideas were divided into ten categories: Safety, Bike Add-ons, Helmets, Navigation, Bike Phone Mounts, Apps, Bike Comfort, Locks, Rain Gear, and Music.