Praxis I: Rigid Pipe Attachment for Water Bottle Filling and Washing at Chestnut Residence

Challenging Assumptions - Diverging

Our team's use of the "Challenging Assumptions" diverging tool allowed us to comprehensive and solution-agnostic diverging process. The Challenging Assumptions tool involves listing our team's assumptions about the opportunty or about potential solutions, and considering what arises if we go against these assumptions. As shown in the notes below, one of our inital assumptions was that the only way to clean a water bottle was using water.

Challenging this assumption led us to consider entirely different design concepts, such as using alcohol or pressurized air to clean the bottles. Eventually, it led us to consider using UV light to disinfect the bottle. This concept actually remained in consideration until the final round of converging, where we used Pugh Charts to eliminate UV-based designs in favour of the rigid pipe with conventional soap/water cleaning. Even though we ended up recommending a solution with a conventional cleaning method, the consideration of alternative methods still pushed us to justify why we intentionally chose the conventional cleaning, instead of ignoring the possibility of alternatives altogether. This added credibility to our argument recommending our final design concept. Thus, I consider Challenging Assumptions to be a valuable tool for initial stages of diverging.