Brainstorm

Individual Idea Generation:

My problem statement from the last assignment , “People need a way to have visibility of their crafting supplies without it looking messy,” led to the creation of my statement for this assignment:

First I made a mind map in hopes of sparking storage ideas and getting into a crafty mindset. I found this method to be helpful. While I didn’t make a ginormous mind map, I did branch enough to give myself some ideas for product sketches.

Then I proceeded to sketch product ideas in my notebook. While this process took a lot of time, I was surprised at how easy some ideas came to me. I tried to have a variety of large scale storage units, like seen in my market survey, as well as some more specific storage which seemed to be lacking in the market.

New Warm-Up Game:

My warm-up game was made with the idea in mind that chocolate can help produce creativity. I decided that minute to win it games are always a winner so my game is to see who could pick up the most M&Ms with their tongue in a minute. Each group member would get a small napkin with some M&Ms and would have a minute to eat as many as they could with their tongue while keeping track. The winner would get nothing except the satisfaction of winning the game.

Session Organization:

I held my brainstorming session in my dorm’s lounge with 4 of my friends. I had both males and females as well as different age representation.

I had asked the participants to come in with 4–10 ideas of craft organization and first had them sketch those ideas. I then added their sketches to my 30 sketches that I had previously come up with. These ideas were taped up off to the side to inspire ideas in the brainstorming session, however, I did not count these ideas towards the brainstorming session total.

To warm up, we played my M&M minute to win it game from above, as well as the word association game that we played in class. After beginning our session, I waited about 10 minutes before introducing my first prompt. My first prompt was word association and I displayed a list of random words to help them with ideas. About 10 minutes later I introduced my second prompt about empathy and displayed a list of people/characters. Finally, I told them to come up with the worst ideas they could think of.

Our brainstorming lasted 32 minutes and we came up with 82 ideas in total. Our ideas per minute (IPM) then equals… 82 ideas/32 minutes=2.56 ideas/min.

this number per person then equals… 82 ideas/32 minutes/5 people=.51 ideas/min/person

This number may seem a little low, however, while I did participate as a 5th person, I was mainly occupied with running the session and therefore may have brought the IPM/person down.

Sorting and Voting:

After our brainstorming session I told everyone to go to the wall and sort the ideas silently. We ended up with 8 groupings, some noticeably larger than others. These groups included pen/pencil organizers, electronic organizers, desktop organizers, notebook organizers, political off topic ideas, wall organizers, specialty craft organizers, and large scale organizers.

After finishing our brainstorming session I gave each of the participants 4 red stickers and 4 blue stickers. The red stickers symbolized the most creative ideas, while the blue stickers symbolized the most plausible/best ideas.

These were the 24 ideas that received stickers. I looked to these ideas first in choosing my top 10 ideas. Unfortunately some of these ideas, while creative or pursuable, derailed from my central theme of craft organization. However, I was able to pick a few ideas to pursue in the following section.

Top Ideas:

__________________________________________________________________Tue 7/17… define “how might we” statement & 10 sketches
Wed 7/18… 10 sketches & contact people for brainstorm session
Thu 7/19… 10 sketches & tell brainstormers to come with 10 ideas
Fri 7/20… 10 sketches, buy colored notecards, sharpies, and chocolate, scan sketches
Sat 7/21… make up warm-up game, update blog
Sun 7/22… host brainstorming session (warm-up, have them sketch ideas, sketch own ideas, what would ___ come up with, word relation, worst ideas, time, total ideas, IPM/person, sort, vote) & start sketching 10 best ideas
Mon 7/23… upload all information and document on blog, sketch best ideas, scan
Tue 7/24…make sure blog is stellar and complete
Wed 7/25… BLOG DUE!