Idea Generation — Part 2
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Timeline
Wednesday, 10/30/19: Make the timeline and make the HMWs
Thursday, 10/31/19: Start describing the set up.
Friday, 11/1/19: Have the brainstorming session, work on the warm up section.
Saturday, 11/2/19: Start describing the brainstorm session in the blog post.
Sunday, 11/3/19: Keep working on the brainstorm session section, try to finish it up. Start on quality presentation ideas.
Monday, 11/4/19: Start working on quality presentation ideas in the blog post
Tuesday, 11/5/19: Finish quality presentation ideas
Wednesday, 11/6/19: Assignment is due!
Thursday, 11/7/19: Present assignment, start on peer review.
Friday, 11/8/19: Complete peer review for idea generation.
HMWs
Here are my previous problem statements that I generated in Blog Post 3. I will change them into How Might We? statements accordingly.
Frugal consumers need a low cost, simple trash solution which has a high capacity and traps odors well.
How might we create simple kitchen trash bins that are efficient and inexpensive?
Vedaant needs a way to move his kitchen trash bin around easily because he and his roommates move around a lot when preparing meals.
How might we make mobile kitchen trash bins?
Professor Ketema needs a way to keep his trash bin liners and bags from floating around as when he tries to throw out his trash the liner always dislocates from the bin.
How might we keep kitchen trash bin liners from dislocating from bins?
Mrs. Barnhouse needs a way to keep odors from escaping her kitchen trash bin during the hot months as when she throws out food such as fruit rinds or fish trimmings there will be unpleasant smells.
How might we make kitchen trash bins that trap odors more efficiently?
As I had more HMW statements than assumed by the rubric for this assignment, I determined that I would have to spend a little less time on each HMW when performing idea generation with my brainstorming group. This ended up working well as some of the participants would have a hard time generating ideas (or unique ideas) for some of the HMWs after a minute or so.
Set Up
My four participants were:
- Ilin Joshi
- Sylvia Wu
- Vedaant Sukhtankar
- Nick Pottorff
I will give some background information about each of them. We are all juniors at the University of Minnesota.
Ilin Joshi
Ilin is majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Chemistry. Ilin enjoys linguistics, video games, and baking lemon bars and muffins. Ilin is also enthusiastic about pajama pants and was excited to help with brainstorming.
Sylvia Wu
Sylvia is a dual major in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her friends as well as trying out new recipes for cooking. Personality wise, she would like to say that she is sympathetic, friendly, and hard-working.
Vedaant Sukhtankar
Vedaant is majoring in Computer Science and has previously been so kind as to help out on the assignment where we were tasked to interview others on their opinions on kitchen trash bins. Vedaant enjoys going to classic rock concerts and enjoyed the brainstorming process.
Nick Pottorff
Nick is majoring in Computer Science and enjoys reading, spending time with his girlfriend, and yelling at Vedaant. Nick is highly competitive and always likes to crack jokes. He excelled at the warm up games and made good ideas for the brainstorming session.
During one class session, it was stated we should have been aiming to obtain a diverse group of people with different life experiences. Even though that three of my group members are majoring in Computer Science and we are all STEM majors, we are all of different races and cultures and have lived all over the world.
Initially, I thought that my apartment would be adequate to perform the brainstorming session. However, we found that it was quite dim and we would move to Ilin’s apartment as his roommates had bought several lamps and string lights.
The session was 55 minutes long, with 15 minutes spent on warm up activities, 25 minutes spent on brainstorming, and 15 minutes for voting on the best ideas. Initially, I wanted to spend a bit more time on brainstorming, but my participants became tired and started complaining.
For a more detailed break down of the time spent during the session, we spent roughly 7 minutes on each warm up activity. For the brainstorming session, we spent 10 minutes on just thinking of any ideas related to better kitchen trash bins, 10 minutes on my HMW statements (with 2.5 minutes for each one as I had four HMW statements), and then 5 minutes on thinking of the worst possible ideas.
For materials, I used some note cards that were far too expensive and a bunch of Sharpies, assigning one color to each person. I would use a spare pen that was lying around for my own color. This was a cheaper way of performing the brainstorming process that we had learned in class as we could just placed the note cards in the middle of the table.
Warm Up
I decided that for warm-up games, my brainstorming team would complete one original activity and one activity that we learned from class.
Original Activity — “Charade Arcade”
My original activity would involve a twist on charades. One player will act out an action of their choice. The other players will be instructed to write down a funny caption for the action that the other player is performing. After everyone has completed writing down their captions, we will all read them and pick our favorites. Repeat with a new player performing the action, until everyone has gone once. This activity is ideal as it gets the players to move around (but not too much as my participants are lazy), makes everyone laugh, and looses them up a bit. It is nice and simple and allows everyone to get into the habit of writing their ideas down.
Activity from Class — “Mr. Whiskers”
For the activity that we performed in class, I thought that the “Mr. Whiskers” activity would be a fun choice as it seemed everyone enjoyed it a lot. Everyone stands in a circle and tries to pass on a phrase to each other in a clockwise direction. If the next person is on the right, then the player will say “misty vista”. If the next person is on the left, then the player will say “whiskey mixer”. Finally, if the player chooses to reverse the direction of the phrase, the player can say “Mr. Whiskers”. The only objective is to not laugh or smile, which ends up causing a lot of laughs and smiles due to the tongue twisting nature of the phrases. If a player laughs or smiles, then the players have to exit the circle, do a lap, and then come back to their original position. This is a great activity to make everyone more comfortable with each other and to have fun before the brainstorming session.
Brainstorm Session
After the warm up games, everyone was ready to start brainstorming. I told the participants about the style of brainstorming that we were about to do. I stated that everyone would take a set of note cards. When coming up with ideas, the participants were directed to title their idea and draw a quick sketch of it. Then, they would present their ideas to the group and set their cards in the middle of the table.
For the first 10 minutes, I directed the group to come up with any ideas related to the general theme of kitchen trash bins.
For the next 10 minutes, I divided the time for idea generation with 2 and a half minutes spent on each of my HMW statements.
For the final 5 minutes (I originally wanted 10 minutes, but Nick complained), I directed the group to come up with the worst ideas possible.
Results
The total number of ideas
Ilin: 30 ideas
Sylvia: 36 ideas
Vedaant: 20 ideas
Nick: 48 ideas
Me: 30 ideas
Total: 164 ideas
Average = 164 ideas / 5 people = 32.8 ideas
It was clear to see that Nick was by far the greatest contributor of ideas, although in part of the session he repeatedly drew the same idea with slight variations.
Vedaant contributed the lowest amount of ideas. I feel that this could be attributed to him giggling most of the time, and also having a tough time in general with some of the HMW statements.
Ilin and I both contributed a modest amount of ideas, and could have most likely contributed a few more as we were both contacted by a friend during part of a session and had to let him into the apartment building. I also lost some time attempting to moderate the session by distributing the cards about the table.
I believe that Sylvia most likely had the highest quality to quantity ratio of all of us as she consistently had good ideas with cute drawings and was a productive member of the session.
IPM for the session
I calculated IPM for each individual, as well as calculating the total IPM for everyone.
Ilin: 30 ideas / 25 minutes = 1.2 ipm
Sylvia: 36 ideas / 25 minutes = 1.44 ipm
Vedaant: 20 ideas / 25 minutes= 0.8 ipm
Nick: 48 ideas / 25 minutes= 1.92 ipm
Me: 30 ideas / 25 minutes = 1.2 ipm
Average for total: 164 ideas / 5 people / 25 minutes = 1.312 ipm
We were slightly above the given value of about 1 ipm as a group, so I considered it to be a successful idea generation session.
Major categories of ideas
I had made a slight mistake in allowing my group members to vote for their favorite ideas first before sorting the ideas. In addition, I had also entirely forgotten to tell everyone to sort the ideas, so I called them back to do so in Keller the next day.
I told everyone to sort silently for 5 minutes, and then they would decide on what areas would belong to each category together. This is what they came up with:
We found that we could agree on 7 major categories of ideas, of which I will elaborate on.
Animals: Several of us ended up drawing animal related ideas when it came to kitchen trash bins. I believe this is interesting as most people do not inherently associate animals with trash, but we thought kitchen trash bins which had animal elements would be good.
Simple: Some of us drew ideas which were simply “trash trash” or “trash hole”.
Unintelligible: It was clear that some of us were unable to read some of the descriptions and we ended up pushing them aside to the edge of the pile.
Locations: A common theme was describing locations to put your trash, such as the Nile delta, Margaret Thatcher’s grave, or the neighbor’s backyard.
Kind of out there: This category had ideas that were slightly weirder and would most likely not be practical or sell well. An example would be the kitchen trash bin with spikes.
Aesthetic changes: These kitchen trash bins would change the appearance of the kitchen trash bin and not provide many changes in functionality. An example of this would be a plant kitchen trash bin, which would just look like a plant but would work the same as a generic kitchen trash bin.
Realistic: We decided that these ideas would be the most likely to sell in a realistic consumer market and were less outlandish than the others.
Voting criteria that was used
As mentioned before, I had forgotten to direct everyone to sort the ideas before voting for them, so here are some nice pictures of all of the cards after being voted on.
When voting for the best ideas, I directed everyone to put a star on ideas that they liked in lieu of buying more supplies such as stickers or black dots. I also told them to avoid voting for their own ideas, as I felt that this was necessary with this group due to their personalities.
We decided that the voting criteria should be whatever each member decided it to be. I told them that they could vote for an idea due to its merit as a realistic kitchen trash bin product or they could vote for an idea just because they found it entertaining. This allowed us to get a large variety of starred ideas that were both funny and useful. In total, 86 of the ideas received one or more stars. In my opinion, I might have given them a bit too much time to place stars (5 minutes) as this means more than half of the cards were starred.
Images of the 10 best ideas
I first started by putting the ideas which had received three stars or more into the top 10. Only five ideas received this distinction, three of which were Nick’s.
Kitchen trash bin with many compartments (4 stars, me): An idea that I had tossed around previously and threw into the brainstorming session. This confirmed to me that it was a good idea to continue pursuing.
Trash goblin (3 stars, Nick): I think this idea was highly liked as the picture was very cute. A cute trash bin could be a good idea!
/b/ (3 stars, Nick): I believe that we only liked this idea as it was funny. /b/ is a message board of the website 4chan which is infamous for having awful content (therefore being a place to put your trash).
Trash robot (3 stars, Nick): This is also a cute picture and I think that a trash robot, not just a smart kitchen trash bin, would be a great continuation of this idea.
Cheap *** polyethylene, buy it (3 stars, Ilin): We appreciated the aggressive nature of the title and the simplistic nature of the bin. A cheap and simple kitchen trash bin will always sell.
I still had to select 5 more ideas for the top 10. Overall, I looked through the ideas which had received two or more stars and selected ones that would work well.
Thermocan (2 stars, Ilin): A kitchen trash bin that could detect the temperature of the bin and determine if bad smells were to occur. In my opinion, this is a great idea.
Infrared can (2 stars, Ilin): This bin would open when it detected a human presence. I think that this bin would quickly run into some issues with opening constantly if there are any people around it, but it has plenty of merits.
Kitchen trash bin that sprays itself with left over bar soap (2 stars, me): This kitchen trash bin would use the scraps of bar soap to clean itself. This would solve one of the problems with bar soap and reduce odor around the kitchen trash bin.
Trash bag skewer (2 stars, Ilin): This would allow you to stop the kitchen trash bin liner from floating around in your bin. I think that this is a great product opportunity.
Spooky trash can that laughs (2 stars, Sylvia): I think we all enjoyed the cute picture and it was an idea in the Halloween spirit. Holiday kitchen trash bins could potentially sell to a wide audience.
Top 10 Ideas
All ideas were selected on the basis of being novel, useful, and feasible. I believe that some of the ideas fulfill some of the categories better than others, but all of them fulfill the categories to some extent.
