Idea Generation Part 2

6 min readNov 2, 2019

HMWs:

How might we make walking the dog more comfortable for the owner?
How might we make leashes for big dogs which last for many years?

Setup:

For my brainstorming session, I chose 4 people of different ages with fairly different backgrounds and personalities, however none of my participants own dogs. I saw this as an advantage for my brainstorming session because this way they could be more creative, versus those who own a dog leash might default to the dog leash they have when coming up with ideas.

My first participant was David, who is 16 years old. David likes animals and has had a couple pet fish before.
My second participant was Suzanne, who is an adult and likes animals generally but has not particularly wanted to own any personally.
My third participant was Sam, who is a college student here at the University of Minnesota with pre-med goals.
My fourth participant was Dennis, who is a Radiologist and has never had a fondness for pets.

None of my participants were entirely sure of what the brainstorming session would involve, so they were a little hesitant at first, but after our warmup exercises they seemed to be ready to start brainstorming. We went through three warmup activities before we began our session: zip zap zop, word ball, and Superhero Soup. After warming up, we began the brainstorming session. Our session used colored paper note cards and pens, which we taped on the wall next to our table so that all of the ideas were visible to all participants. We sat at a round table for our session, which lasted a total of 26 minutes.

Warm up:

My warmup exercise is called Superhero Soup. For this warmup activity, each person has to come up with different superheroes who’s superpowers involve something that starts with each letter of their first name. For example, my name is Eric, and so I would have to come up with four superheroes, and each hero would have a power relating to the letters E, R, I, and C.

Brainstorming session:

Each person was assigned a different color note card so that we could tell who came up with each idea in the end. David had yellow, Suzanne had green, Sam had red, Dennis had purple, and I had blue. Over the 26 minute period, David came up with 17 ideas, Suzanne came up with 20 ideas, Sam came up with 14 ideas, and Dennis came up with 17 ideas. I was only able to come up with 11 because I was taping all of the ideas to the wall and facilitating the session.

After brainstorming for a bit, we transitioned into our first rolestorming mindset. For this first rolestorm, I decided that we should come up with dog leash ideas from the mindset of a 10 year old kid. This is the age when kids might start to walk their dogs on their own, and so this is an important group to consider when creating dog leashes.

Once we had finished rolestorming as 10 year old kids, we transitioned to our second rolestorm. For this second rolestorm I chose elders because this made us think from the opposite end of the age spectrum and allowed us to come up with some very different ideas from kids. Elders also might have a more difficult time walking their dog, and so creating from this mindset could help us come up with leashes which make walking your dog easier for these people.

After finishing our second rolestorming exercise, we had our final board of ideas which showed all of the ideas created and who came up with each one.

The total IPM for our group was an average of 3.07 ideas per minute. After brainstorming and rolestorming, I had my participants sort all of the ideas into categories, and then together we came up with titles for each catagory. The following are the idea catagories which we came up with: