Brainstorm
Individual Idea Generation
…How might we conveniently sort dirty, worn, and clean clothes?
I spent several hours thinking of 30 different ideas for solving the problem above, at first it was a little hard, but as I kept going, coming up with ideas became easier and the ideas were better:
New Warm-Up Game
For a warm-up game, I came up with a game that consisted in using “MadMatter” (a futuristic doh) to make the weirdest shape and then have it stand by itself (since the doh is not solid at all). The catch is that every minute you need to rotate your shape to the right, so it makes the game more competitive since some shapes were obviously better that others. We played this for 10 minutes until one of my friends won and was super excited for it.
Session Organization
I organized a 6 person brainstorming group, it was really diverse since we had people from different parts of the World, different ages, and different majors:
Alberto: From Venezuela, 18, Business
Sebastian: From Venezuela and St.Paul, 18, History
Isaac: From St. Paul, 18, Undecided
Marcos: From Venezuela, 22, Communications
Luji: From Oman, 20, Physics
Danielle: From Madison, 19, Psychology
I told all of them to bring at least 2 ideas for conveniently sorting clothes, so we started the brainstorming session with everyone showing their ideas. I also chose to bring some food to keep the ideas flowing, so we had some ice cream and chicken nuggets before the brainstorming session started. After that we played the “MadMatter” warming up game for 10 minutes. Additionally, we played our own version of “spoons”. The game consists in having a specific number of spoons on a table and everyone has four cards, then cards start rotating to the right until someone has four of the same card, once that happens they can grab a spoon, when this happens everyone can grab a spoon, and the person that didn’t get a spoon (since theres one less that the number of players) loses and has to go under the table for the whole round. After playing this games, we were ready to start the brainstorming session.
For idea generation we spent about 20 minutes on it, got to a total of 23 ideas, so 0.3 ideas per minutes per person.
Sorting and Voting
For sorting the ideas, the categories sorted to were sorting machines and convenient ways to store clothes but I decided to it in a spectrum going from one category to the other. After that, I had them vote on each idea by putting a blue dot on each idea they liked, each participant could only put 4 blue dots.
Top Ideas
After the sorting and voting, I chose the 10 best ideas from the group and individual brainstorming session, and re-sketch them to explain them in a better way. These are the best ideas, because they are creative and viable (except the shrink gun), I also feel all of them would definitely solve the problem faced.
Timeline
