This past class our team was able to spend a lot of time brainstorming and figuring out different problems that we could solve. A big lesson we learned was that not to brainstorm product ideas in search of solutions to solve but to rather focus on finding a good problem to solve. By focusing on finding a good problem to solve you leave room to make any product possible and leave a lot of creative freedom for your team to figure out what to make. For us certainly did fall into the trap of focusing on creating products first rather than finding a proper problem to solve. We thought of drones for kids, an aquaponics, and a way to better manage your time.
All decent ideas on their own but again the issue is that we definitely limit ourselves by just focusing on the product rather than the problem statement. By moving backward into the problem statement we give ourselves a lot more freedom in regards to what to make.
In the brainstorming process, we were given a ton of freedom to pretty much find any problem we want to try and solve. That alone was incredibly exciting. The possibilities were pretty endless without considering anything like costs or even to some extent feasibility of the idea itself. We were given a huge sheet of white paper and some markers to which we just pushed forward to start writing anything we felt like.
Moving forward I think our team will be looking to figure out “how can people who want to urban garden in small areas grow plants”. So for this, we’ll be drawing inspiration from a couple of existing solutions. Typically to make this aquaponics it requires a single fish and some sort of environment for the fish to live in. The plant then uses the fishes’ waste to grow and in turn, the plant provides nutrients to the fish so it can keep on living. We would look to probably 3D print the parts necessary to contain the fish and contain the plant.
Example Aquaponics: https://flic.kr/p/SqJFZY
All In all, we’re very excited to start making the product and here are some resources that we hope to use to help us keep on brainstorming ideas and solutions!
Brainstorming tips:
http://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/10-longtime-brainstorming-techniques-that-still-work.html
https://www.wrike.com/blog/techniques-effective-brainstorming/
Hi Ian,
I agree with your thoughts on our class activity, we all tended to find a solution to a problem rather than finding the problem and potentially coming up with multiple solutions. However, I did really enjoy taking a route of stepping back and looking at issues that individuals have. I really like the idea of the aquaponics style of urban gardening as most college students live in compact areas and it would be a nice solution.