Brainstorming and Ideation

The actual meaning of brainstorming is “to solve a problem or make a decision by thinking of as many ideas as possible in a short time”, but when it comes to working in collaboration and working on some project, We consider as bringing up the weird, out of the box ideas on the table.

Brainstorming and Ideation session was conducted by Spruha and Rajashri. They discussed how to brainstorm and what needs to be considered for brainstorming. When we select the problem to be worked on, we need to come up with a different solution that would fit. We need to check the user’s needs and not the user's Want, we did it by asking 5 whys. And then in collaboration, we shall ideate on the problem/product.

In the brainstorming and ideation session, I was part of team 7. My teammates Antony, Raj, Meera and Vijaya, firstly thought about the product that we find has some changes required and we want to work on. I came up with a problem with the Water bottle holder and similarly, other team members thought the product they think are problematic. Upon discussing several products we selected the office chair. Now the main task was to Ideate upon the office chair.

In the Ideation phase, every team member needs to come up with 3 basic, unique ideas for the product, and when they do it, they shall add on the idea previously generated by other team members. In physical space this task was bit easy with rotating sheets, but in online setting we used google spreadsheet to do so.

My initial ideas were, Netted Back-support to keep air flow, Neck rest should be movable right-left and Hand rest must be detachable front-back and top-down movement. Initially all of brainstormed and come up with 15 unique ideas, Next phase that we follow was to add upon the idea of previous member and refine it with our own ideas to it. As we were 5 person in team, I refined other 12 ideas of others, resulting in total 15 ideas by me.

The best:-

1. Brainstorming help us to think out-of the box and generate weird, fancy, workable ideas.

2. Collaboration help to select the product to work on by differentiating Needs and Wants.

3. Individually I created 3 idea, but in collaboration it raised to 15.

4. Ideation helps to understand and accept other person’s view.

Could be Better:-

1. In collaboration initially I needed to unlearn few things and adjust what other are saying. In online mode its bit hard, offline setting would have worked well.

2. We haven’t fixed the deadline for ideation phase, that’s why few people done with ideation early and few somehow late. Fixed timing should be imposed.

The next step to Brainstorming and Ideation was Decision Matrix, that is discussed in next session of tools.