So its the first week with the new lecturer Clark (week 3), which is awesome and really interesting for us for we haven’t been taught by anyone else this whole year. This week we will be focusing on the generation of ideas and creating a large pool of material that we can eventually get some initial concepts from.

 

Monday:

Today we had to come up with a opportunity statement, which helped us to define the direction we would take in the project. One simple sentence that took us over one hour to narrow down, no where near as easy as I had thought it would be. There was a few different ideas of where the project should go and what the group should be focussing on, whether it should be to do with safety, or entertainment etc. Once we had our focus on a targeted user we found it was easier to craft such a statement, and after a few drafts we came up with this opportunity statement : “To diverge the attention of distracted users as there is a need for an engaging, occupied wait, as impatience leads to erratic decisions.” I really see the importance of the opportunity statement now as we can refer back to it during the project and it will help us to stay on the right track.

 

Tuesday:

Today we focused on the mind mapping our ideas that we had for our solution, which was a lot fun to do as a whole group and everything from the weird and wonderful to the completely conservative was welcome at this brainstorming party. The group is Starting to hit some momentum now that we are getting into some of the more exciting stages of our project, and the team vibe is at a high. to communicate our ideas in a way that would be efficient to revisit we placed all our concept ideas on a 2 axis chart, one axis ranged from radical to conservative and the other from what best matched the opportunity statement to what didn’t. Sorting the ideas like this helped to show the good ideas and the not so good ideas more prominent, and made it a lot easier to agree on good ideas when the facts were right in front of you. Some of the ideas you didn’t think were as strong as the rest, proved to be more suited to the opportunity statement as you may have first thought. I really liked this way of sorting ideas because you can clearly see which ones stand out and which ones should maybe be left behind, also ideas you may have thought were a bit stupid sometimes will prove to be the best. After we had completed the axis chart we had to pick three ideas to investigate into further. So as a group we decided that we would pick one radical, one conservative and one neutral idea that all met the opportunity statement well. These ideas ended up being:

– Directional Sound Cones

– A Countdown Timer

– An artificial  

 

Wednesday:

This week has been all about creating ideas and heaps of them. Today we focused on our three ideas that we had picked from our 2 axis chart we completed yesterday. Our first task was to create a set of constraints for each idea to help us understand where the idea could possibly go. We were encouraged to go a little nuts on some of our constraints for sometimes that is how the best ideas are born. This also forced us as a group to think about aspects of the solution we wouldn’t normally consider at such an early point in a project. For me this task was an effective way for us to diverge our thinking and broaden the influences on the solution.

 

The next task was to dissect our ideas and put them back together using the acronym S.C.A.M.P.E.R. This stands for, substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate and reverse. This was another way of diverging our thinking. We had to choose one of our three ideas to use this idea generating concept on. We initially chose the countdown timer as it seemed like the most practical idea, and build on it. This worked well with a few of the techniques but we felt as a group that it would be more beneficial to use some of the stages of S.C.A.M.P.E.R. later on once we had a more clear idea of the direction of the solution.

 

Thursday/Friday:

Over the last couple of day we have mostly been updating the pages in our portfolio and making sure that everyones pages are consistent with each others and that we all agree on each others layout decisions. We sat down together and reviewed the pages as a collective and constructively gave suggestions on how to improve the presentation of our work. Some of the things we had to approach was we were struggling on ideas on how to present graphs in a new way that would be more engaging to look at, and we had a go at a few different approaches that turned out well. Overall this week has been really productive and feel the team is starting to feel like we are making some real progress to narrowing down our ideas into a quality solution.