Brainstorm
Individual Idea Generation
How might we attract users to bike safety equipment?
New Warm-Up Game
My warm-up game involves going around in a circle with each member saying a word in order to complete a full sentence. The catch is that it must follow the sentence guideline, and each word must start with the same letter.
The sentence structure given was: Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun, and Adverb.
Whoever begins the game can choose the starting letter for the sentence or the group can decide together.
Session Organization
Ellie (left) is Computer Science major in College of Science and Engineering. She’s from Minnetonka, Minnesota. Ellie rarely bikes, but she has a close friend who is a very avid biker.
“I don’t bike much, but with how often Ken talks about biking, I feel like I do.”
Brayden (right) is studying environmental science and comes from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He lives off campus and keeps a bike at school.
Jacob (left) is a Mechanical Engineering student from Rogers, Minnesota. He doesn’t bike on campus, but enjoys biking in his hometown.
“I like to bike over the summer when I am at home.”
Tegan (right) is from Appleton, Wisconsin and studies Technical Writing and Communication. She doesn’t own a bike but prefers to skateboard around campus.
Claire was not a fully-participating member of the brainstorming session, but stayed in the same room and shared input and ideas every once in a while. She is a Health Services Management major from Geneva, Wisconsin. She used a bike on campus all of her freshman year.
The session took place in the evening at my apartment’s dining table. It was a bit cramped, so I moderated from the kitchen bar just a couple feet away. I provided everyone with large sticky notes and a large selection of markers. We used the doors of the laundry closet as a display wall for ideas.
For warm up I started by having each member come up with a quick plan for a theoretical zombie apocalypse and give a brief description of what they would do. We then played the Zip Zap Zop game done in class. After that, I taught them my new warm-up game, and we played a few rounds.
When warm up was finished, I quickly described the ideation process they would be going through and shared a few of my sketches from individual idea generation.
Ideation took place for 30 minutes and the session produced just over 30 new ideas leading to about 1 idea per minute.
Sorting and Voting
The ideas were sorted into the following categories: Helmets, Bike/Attachments, On Person, and Infrastructure.
After that, each member was given 10 small sticky notes.
5 blue for most creative ideas and 5 pink for ideas most worth pursuing.
All ideas with no sticky notes were removed and, we began to discuss which ideas were the best. Eventually we arrived at our top ten.
Top Ideas
(Apologies for the pictures. Had trouble with my scanner connecting and had to use a faulty scanning app.)
Holographic Helmet & Turn Signals
Collapsable Helmet & Pedal-Powered Lights
Glow-In-The-Dark Bike & Strap-On Helmet Compartment
Biking App & Reflective Bag Buttons
Helmet Rental Service & Pedal-Powered Phone Charger
Timeline
