Nov 13
The theme for this week's ideation was "patient waiting rooms". Similar to last week, we spent a few minutes defining different "spaces" for the ideation theme in order to frame our ideas.
After we had generated a list of about ten different spaces, we chose the six we thought would be the most helpful and interesting. Unlike last week's ideation where we also created a list of categories, this week we went through each category sequentially, spending three minutes on each.
Overall, this ideation method was very effective. The sequential approach to the categories meant that each category was given an equal chance for exploration. Also, limiting ideation for each category to three minutes seemed to provide a little bit of urgency and possibly increased our output rate of ideas per minute.
Also of interest:
How Doctors Think Ben Schneiderman on electronic health records
search and
visualizations.
Nov 8
This time our theme for ideation was "How to promote recycling and reuse at MIT". We started off by brainstorming about categories as a group, and then we wrote them on the board for everyone to see. After spending a few minutes on categories, we then switched to ideating concepts on individual pieces of paper and posting those to the board.
Looking back at the session, the categories were helpful for coming up with ideas, but our ideation might have been helped if we structured a few minutes for each category, rather than a free-for-all. There's definitely some more experimenting we can do with this method, and I'm sure it's something we'll come back to in the future.
Nov 8
I went to the presentation at MIT by William Kamkwamba and Bryan
Mealer about the wind generators William has built in Malawi.
William's story is very inspiring — incredible when you think about the lack of support or materials available to him. Learn more about William from his TEDTalk or the book he wrote with Bryan.
--Geoff
Nov 8
Friday, October 9th we had our first "Ideation Friday". So far this is
just an experiment, but we hope it will become a weekly event.
How did it go? See for yourself with our sketches of concepts for
clothing and clothes organization:
Oct 21
Great op-ed from the New York Times about bento boxes.
John Maeda's ideas on "doing more with less" are insightful, but don't miss some of the commentary at the end.
