Idea Generation Pt. 2
HMWs
“How might we” statements are important in the big scheme of thing. They determine our priorities going into the brainstorming session.
Pulling from the research in assignment three, there are several key traits that we can see are important to people: Stability, durability, adaptability, cost, and hands-free use. For this brainstorming session, I decided to focus on the traits that would lead to the most “blue sky” ideas.
HMW #1: How might we create more effective hands-free communication methods?
This how might we is based off of the fact that most people do not want to interact with their phone in the car. By expanding the statement to hands free communication methods in general, we allow ourselves to wander outside of a car-related context and free ourselves to think about other ideas in the future of hands free communication.
This also directly translates from my first problem statement in assignment 3: Anonymous, a single mother of two, needs a way to navigate places while keeping her hands on the road, because she is trying to focus on getting from point A to point B.
HMW #2: How might we make it easier to interact with your phone in the car?
This connects to my third problem statement in assignment 3: Drivers need a way to play music and use apps without actively putting their hands on their phones, because that may present a safety hazard to everyone else inside the car.
People clearly want to utilize their phone’s capabilities in the car (otherwise the market would not exist); but they don’t necessarily want to interact with their phone directly. This HMW makes sure that we will focus on the automobile during the actual brainstorming session, but does not obligate us to come up with incremental car phone mount based solutions.
Set Up
Participant Backgrounds
Zoe is an out of state student from Iowa, studying psychology. She has experience with musical theater, and can often be found singing Falsettos at 3 AM in the dorm right next to me.
Angela is an out of state student from Wisconsin, studying neuroscience. She travels fairly often because she is in a long distance relationship.
Arcadia is an in state student studying dance. They are heavily involved with dance productions in and around campus, and can often be found at house shows around the Minneapolis area. They most often use public transit, but can also drive.
Noah is an in state student studying computer science. He is passionate about costume design (in the form of cosplay).
Owen is an in state student with a double major in materials science and anthropology. They are one of the more technology minded members of the group, having worked in various CSE labs and archaeology dig sites.
Games and Prompts
Before the brainstorming session itself begins, I am going to do two improv based games. First will be Zip, Zap, Zop, and the next will be my original game (detailed in the warm up section below).
Since a few of the participants come from a theater background, I decided that the rolestorming activity would fit quite well into the plan for our set of games. This allows the participants to be creative while also fitting into something that they are comfortable and competent at.
Another game that will be done during the activity to keep up our spirits is negative brainstorming. As the group of people gathered tends to be a rather sarcastic and witty bunch, this is a prompt that fits well within the context we have.
General Preparation
The brainstorming session is being held in the Comstock Hall large lounge on the 5th floor in the east wing. This was decided upon due to the copious amount of wall space, lockable door, and large table to sit at.
To prepare for the session, I went to the Dinkytown Target and bought all the necessary supplies. These included sticky notes, different colors of sharpie, and other assorted materials. However, I was unable to find sticker or label sheets for the brainstormers to use, so I found small packets of Washi tape that could be torn and used in a similar manner.
Finally, I ordered pizza to arrive before the session starts. Pizza pretty much turns anything into an instant party and raises dopamine levels significantly, so it was worth it (despite the hit to my bank account).
Timeline
The activity as a whole will take around an hour.
0–10 min: Zip, zap, zop, and warmup activity.
10–20 min: General theme
20–30 min: How Might We Statement 1
30–40 min: How Might We Statement 2
40–50 min: Sorting ideas
50–60 min: Voting on ideas and unpacking
Warm Up
My warm up activity is a derivative of the word ball activity called First. In my game, one person will call out a noun, and the other people will respond in turn with something they associate with that. The first person to come up with a word “wins”, and gets to pick the noun for the next round.
This is a new ideas that I created based off of my favorite activity that I was shown during the improv activities. It is meant to stimulate making connections between different ideas — exactly what one would want to do during a brainstorming session!

Brainstorm Session
Background

The brainstorming session started with the Davanno’s delivery pizza in the Comstock hall 5th East lounge. We did not do introductions, as everyone was generally a member of the established friend group and knew each other prior to our meeting in the lounge.

For our warmup games, we played my original game and Zip, Zap, Zop. Zip, Zap, Zop wamed us to be interactive and spontaneous, while my own game created some laughs and got the creativity flowing (especially when I brought out some props)!
Idea Generation



First, we spent time on the general category of “How can you attach your phone to your car”? This question was meant to blow the category wide open, and then later we would conquer specifics with progressive revelation.
This first round was by far the most productive, with several ideas generated. Unfortunately, the next few ideas got progressively less productive. We had another member added to our group during the second HMW statement, which helped with fresh ideas, but overall, it wasn’t great.
The failures in ideas generation may have resulted from a number of different things. Firstly, there was a lack of investment in the product itself. The majority of people in the group either used public transit or walking to get to most of their destinations. Secondly, the session was admittedly unfocused; there was a lot of joking around and distraction.
Total Ideas and Sorting

In total, there were 69 ideas (nice). When you calculate the IPM for the session, this comes out to .575 IPM. This isn’t a great number, but there was still valuable insight to be had from the session.
We took about 7 minutes to sort all of the ideas. The participants were explicitly told not to talk to each other, but since this was a very chatty group, they did so anyway.

In the end, the major categories consisted of:
- Body extensions and modifications
- Additions to the car
- Things activated via human interaction
- Joke ideas
- Jake Gyllenhaal related ideas
- “Go-between” objects
- Objects that attach to different parts of car
- Human body modifications
Voting for ideas

The voting criteria was, in my own words “What seems like the best realistic idea”? This was meant to eliminate some of the “joke” ideas (such as any suggestion of the actor Jake Gyllenhaal) from consideration.

The ten most voted for ideas in the session generally correlated well with my own top ten ideas, and I combined the two together to create a consensus top ten of ideas. While this exercise was fun, I didn’t get any particularly original ideas from it, and my participants were more willing to stick inside the box than try and expand out of it. The blue ideas were by Noah, the pink ideas were by Arcadia, and the orange ideas were by Angela. Generally, the people with the highest amount of “creative” ideas were people who were used to doing creative tasks in their daily lives (Dance and cosplay creation, respectively).
Top 10 Ideas
My top ten ideas floated more towards incremental innovation than radical innovation, but overall consisted of a pretty even mix from all assignment categories.
Using the Novel, Feasible, Valuable framework, I cut out ideas that were silly, impossible to manufacture within the projected budget, or of inappropriate scale. From there, I took ideas that I thought would play well with my target audience, eventually coming up with my final 10 ideas. I rendered these in marker and scanned them into my computer.









