Ideation

To begin our design process, we started by brainstorming and compiling our ideas. Knowing that we were aiming for an office theme, we brainstormed supplies, potential actions and how to include electronics into our machine. As we accumulated ideas, we were able to narrow down our focus and how our list potential actions could be constructed into a sequence to create a Rube Goldburg Machine.

The images above are the product of our early brainstorming. The image on the left demonstrates our first group brainstorming and idea generation and the image on the right illustrates one of our first sketches of what our RGM could look like by combining the ideas we had generated. 

Once we had developed the overall concept of our RGM, we broke down the actions into the steps seen in the flowchart above. The mechanical actions are in teal, the electronic steps are highlighted in yellow and the transitions between groups is in pink. This was the first flowchart we developed to organize our RGM before we began constructing the machine and, therefore, elements were bound to change as we entered into the implementation stage.

The final step before we starting building our machine, we presented a project proposal to our class to communicate our ideas and the sequence of actions we were planning on executing. This served to ensure that groups had sufficiently distinct ideas and catalyzed conversation between groups for smooth mechanical transitions between groups.