Brainstorm

8 min readOct 19, 2016

How might we save water doing basic activities?

My General Ideas

water collect fan: collect the water vapor generated from the hot water when taking showers through fans. Reuse the water again and avoid the wet walls.

water vacuum collector: an idea combined with vacuum cleaner. Collect the water left on the sides and the bottom of bathtub through the holes inside the bathtub.

water reuse system: collect the waste water from sink, bathtub, washing machine, and reuse these water to flush toilet.

sink with multiply water faucet: reversal idea

water usage reminder: reminders you can put on any appliance that using water to reminder how much water you have used. Including information, gallons of water used per water, total amount water you used, the number of days which those amount water can keep you alive.

vapor washing machine: use water vapor to clean dirty clothes in order to save 99% water and kill most of bacterias.

dishwasher that using separate small areas: the user doesn’t have save dirty disks for many days. Even a few amount of disks, you can choose the area you want to clean in the dishwasher.

New Warm-up Game

I called this game “action freeze”. Group members stand together and form a circle. The first person in the group starting the game count backwards from 5 and covers his eyes with hands. During this five-second period, other people in the group have to pick their own difficult action and act before the first person opens his eyes. Then he will judge and picks out a guy who is doing an easy action or moving. Then that guy become the person who starts next turn.

Session Organization

I invited four people, Michael, Eric, Sara and Jim into my session. Three are students, one is a boss of a pizza restaurant.

Background: Michael is a graduated student who is studying and doing researches in the field of Chemical Enginnering. Eric is a sophomore student whose major is electrical engineering. Sara is also a sophomore student who study in biology. And Jim is the boss of the pizza restaurant. I think Micheal and Sara’s backgrounds have some relationships to my topic: water usage. Also, Jim has to manage the water used inside his restaurant, thus his job is absolutely connected to water.

Settings: As the person holding the session, my major job is collecting and repeating the ideas generated in the brainstorm. As for others, they are participants in my session.

Firstly, I introduced them to each other and explained what we are going to do specificly to them. And we started playing some warm up games.

Warmup games: I started with the word ball game, then came up with the story spine game, next we played my new warm up game -“action freeze”. Group members stand together and form a circle. The first person in the group starting the game count backwards from 5 and covers his eyes with hands. During this five-second period, other people in the group have to pick their own difficult action and act before the first person opens his eyes. Then he will judge and picks out a guy who is doing an easy action or moving. Then that guy become the person who starts next turn.

And the game playing was a lot of fun which is beyond my expectation.

After warmup games, I gave my group about 10 minutes to discuss the topic with their own understanding and share the ideas they already had. (I told them to generate some ideas about “how might save water doing basic activities” two or three days before the session started.)

Then I let them to sketch those ideas with 15 minutes after exchanging ideas with others. And that is the phase 1.

In the phase 2, I introduced the method of rolestorming which let them to imagine themselves as different identities even superheros. It came up with a bunch of interesting ideas over that 5 minutes.

Next in the phase 3, I introduced the method of negative brainstorming which let them to find ways how to waste water. I also gave 5minutes to my group in that section.

At the last phase 4, I combined the methods of brute think and props together. I asked them to pick up a random word from PPT firstly, then pick up a random object from the surrounding. We spent about 3 minutes in this phase. I think the time used is perfect, because I promised them the session would not last longer than 40 minutes and they found it was kind of hard to generate ideas on that topic after phase 123.

Total time used in the session: 53 minute

warmup game(15) + discussion, idea exchange(10) + phase 1(15) + phase 2(5) + phase 3(5) + phase 4(3)

IPM:

42/28=1.5 idea/minute

total ideas: 42

Sorting and Voting

After discussion, my group decided to divide these 42 ideas into 7 categories:

During multi-voting, each member of my group has four votes and they can not vote for themselves. Before voting, I took out of all unreal ideas. At first round, they picked up 14 ideas. Then I picked out the higher votes ideas from those fourteen and left 8 ideas. Next, I asked them to mark them four favorite ideas until another 4 came out.

water reuse:

The ideas in this category are trying to use the waste water in other place, and they are mainly focused on the methods of using waste water not collecting.

2.water recycle

The ideas in this category introduce the ways of recycling water, they are mature methods than other category because they are systems.

3.water collect(from air, from weather, from waste)

This category is mainly focused on the ways of collecting water. We were trying to find out the places that we can collect waste water and the efficient way to collect them.

4.water produce

As for this part, obviously it introduced how to produce water instead of saving and reusing.

5. usage decrease

Instead of thinking about saving and reusing, stop wasting water is another perspective.

6.habit forming

7.fantasy ideas

Some products or ideas beyond reality.

Top Ideas

Water usage reminder(Sara): reminders you can put on any appliance that using water to reminder how much water you have used. Including information, gallons of water used per water, total amount water you used, the number of days which those amount water can keep you alive.

This idea/product is good for those housewifes.

water collector in the car(Sara):

when snowing and raining, the collectors in the car will collect and filtrate water. When we drive back home, you can take those water tanks out and use the water inside.

This product is good for those people who have a car and drive a lot outside.

Steam Shower(Jim):

Use high pressure but low temperature steam to clean your body. This steam shower capsule can save 99% water and even can help people get rid of soaps!

This product is designed for those people take long time showers.

Snow or rain water collector for house(Sara):

When raining or snowing, water will flow into the huge water tank under the house through roof and pipes. The filter will basically clean the water. The heater on the roof will melt the snow in the winter.

This one can be applied to anywhere, especially for those family in water shortage areas.

sewage recycle machine(Michael):

collect all the sewage inside house then filtrate and distill it, finally get the pure water.

This one can be applied to anywhere, especially for those family in water shortage areas.

Range hood that separate oil and steam(Eric):

A range hood that can separate the oil&smoke and steam when you cook at home. Save steam and turn it into water.

This product is good for housewife who loves cooking a lot.

High efficient water spray for garden(Sara):

A better design for sprays in the garden which makes them use water much more efficiently.

automatic flowering flowerpot that use rain water(Jim):

A flowerpot that can save water when raining, and it will flower the plants automatically.

human shape bathtub(Eric):

a bathtub that designed as a human shape. It saves a lot of water unnecessarily used during a shower. You just need to lie in the bathtub and get up, then you are clean.

This product is designed for those people take long time showers.