Business Lab
Homework 10
Prior Art
Introduction
Before embarking on the design, innovation or invention of a creative technology product, it’s important, if not critical to do your homework and investigate the literature as well as tangential realizations of your ideas.
The reasoning behind doing background research is primarily to ensure you are well aware of the depths of the challenge, as well as the set of ‘solved’ problems that lay ahead of you. Your goal is to reduce risk, specifically, the risk that you:
- Lack the technical knowledge to implement your prototype — background research will help you to properly set your expectations, and better understand the knowledge you need to gain, and the knowledge that you can forego.
- Lose sight of the big picture — background research will help you ensure you are not solving the wrong problem or validating the wrong assumptions.
- Waste time — most importantly, an hour spent researching the technologies, their capabilities and use cases can save you 10x as much prototyping time.
Where to Start?
This depends on your specific needs, but in general, you should start with compiling a docket of resources for you and your team to review and discuss. These can take many forms, some are obvious, while others are less so:
- Scientific and working papers
- Patents
- Proceedings from industry and academic conferences
- Online videos
- Enthusiast forums
- Newsgroups
- Tutorials and Guides
Methodology
Your goal is to rapidly skim these resources to figure out if they have even a tangential relationship to your project. Even if they appear too advanced, you might find some interesting insights that can help you better plan how your prototype could be implemented, or better yet, the barriers that you might face towards implementation. For example, take a look at this 2014 patent from Google for radar-based gesture recognition:
If you were working to try and create an interface to allow the deaf to better communicate, you might stumble upon this when searching for ‘hand tracking’ and quickly assume it was too advanced or time-consuming to explore. However, you might find that reviewing the filing gives you an entirely new idea for a problem to solve — detecting the presence of human tissue through walls, which could be useful in improving health and safety, or even a better way of choosing when and where to provide heat, cool and electrify buildings!
Instructions
As a team:
- Discuss your technical research agenda in your team Slack channel over the course of the week. This should be a conversation (your instructors will also participate). Each team member should contribute. The goal of this agenda is to identify existing products or projects that you can learn from as well as to discuss how to make your prototype. For example, you might identify a core set of technologies (ReactJS, a database, etc…), React libraries etc…and a produce a research agenda and project plan that clearly outlines the technical goals your prototype should reach.
- Summarize your discussion and approach in a research agenda document.
- Each team member should identify and summarize at least TWO distinct sources that further inform the technical work the group will perform over the next few weeks. One source must be an accessible, achievable tutorial or guide (search Youtube).
Post these resources to your group’s Slack channel prior to the next course session.
