Blue Sky Ideation
Individual Idea Generation
When brainstorming organization ideas, I used the question How might we make the process of packing and unpacking work goods more convenient? These are the >30 ideas I came up with.
New Warm-Up Game
In my packaging design class, we had a really broad assignment that led to me creating an open-ended deck of cards. Each one has an illustrated noun, an adjective, and a number, allowing users to come up with their own uses and rules.
They were inspired in part by the improv games from this class, so I thought I wanted to use them for this. I made a badly drawn prototype of the entire deck so that there would be an adequate number of cards:
The game I initially came up with was to take turns drawing a card from the deck and using the object to add a piece to a continuous story. What was really exciting to see is how they started using the cards differently and transform the game themselves; after the first round, they started using the adjectives and numbers. Lastly, and nearly unsolicited, they made an Apples-to-Apples style game where two nouns would compete for most accurate to an adjective.
In a way, the tool used for the initial improv game transformed into an improv activity itself: improvise a new use for the deck of cards.
Session Organization
In the order they appear here, my group consisted of my friend Sarah (graphic design major), my brother (senior in high school), my two parents, and my boyfriend (computer science major). This accounts for a range of experiences– different disciplines as well as different stages of life.
We did the card warm-up game as well as a short round of zip/zap/zop before getting into brainstorming. I asked them to spend ten minutes writing ideas on their own on index cards beforehand so they could have something to go off of.
For the actual group brainstorming session, I timed it for 45 minutes. This sounds like it would be fake, but we had 199 ideas. How frustrating is that? If you include me in the group despite mostly facilitating, our IPM is 0.703.
Sorting and Voting
Silent voting was followed by some vocalized condensing; with 200 ideas, not everyone got to see all of the space and we ended up with some duplicate groups.
The categories that arose from the sorting were as follows.
- Stuff Delivery Services
- Writing Utencils
- Wearable Organization
- Communal Resources
- Things That Preserve
- Advanced Technologies
- Office Space in Transit
- Modified Tools for Ease of Transport
- The Desks
- Mobile Apps
- Backpacks & Bags
- Remembering Things for Packing
- Carriers & Containers
- Plants/Growth
- “Fun” Ways to Transport
- Food
- Illumination
- Rewarded Packing
For multi-voting, I distributed five stickers to each person and told them to pick their top 5 ideas that were most plausible. Some of the popular ideas include a backpack that turns into a laptop stand, puzzle piece storage containers, Swiss Army office supplies, an Aldi-style quarter system, as well as some more out-there solutions like virtual reality and community office spaces.
Top Ideas
Having chosen the best ten ideas to suit the problem statement, I re-sketched and labelled them. The ones that were from other people’s ideas during the brainstorming session include the laptop stand (Stryker), the Swiss Army supplies (my father), and the GPS Remember-All (Cassie as well as my brother).
