Brainstorm

Outline

Zachary Whittier

4 min readOct 18, 2018

Individual Idea Generation

How might we make intersections safer for pedestrians and drivers?

New Warm-Up Game

For my new warm-up game, I knew my participants were new to any improv games. So I made a game that was easy to learn and even easier play. It’s simply called Last Letter. There’s only one rule: say a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word. Sounds easy enough, but I ended up ruining the first game on the second turn by saying race-car, which everyone then proceeded to repeat afterwards. So we ended up starting over.

Session Organization

The lucky four people I bribed with pizza and beer were Matt, Ashley, Garrett, and Ryan. Matt has been friend of mine for a long while. His girlfriend, Ashley, who I’ve only met a couple times was able to help me out. Garrett has also been a friend of mine for a while. And I have been working with Ryan for about two years. Each participant drives besides Ryan, but I thought the different perspective was beneficial. Each one of them has experienced almost getting into an accident while crossing an intersection, whether they were they were the ones driving, and they didn’t see the pedestrian right away, or vice versa. To warm up, we just played the Last Letter game. Then we got right into brainstorming for 30 minutes. At first they weren’t quite sure what was okay, but I told all ideas were good. And they just started riddling off plenty of ideas. When they got stuck on thinking of ideas, I started feeding in some of my ideas, but I think that discouraged them a little bit. They started questioning their own ideas and ended up not sketching each idea. By the end of the 30 minutes, they came up with 21 ideas, not including my own, which means an IPM of 0.7.

Sorting and Voting

We ended up sorting all of the new ideas into four groups. Flying, Cross Blockers, Warnings, and tunnel/bridge, which might have been able to be split up, but were similar enough to consolidate into one. We started with a silent sort method, but at the end we started to debate on ideas we were unsure about. Then each of us picked our top 3 favorite ideas.