Blue Sky Ideation

Individual Idea Generation

I started my idea generation with a mind map. I added my how might we quote, which was “How might we help drivers focus on driving?”, and branched out from there. I started with main reasons how drivers got distracted, and thought of ways to help with this distraction. With ways to help with this distraction is when I came up with ideas. One challenge I did come up with for my ideas, is I was making products that made it easier for people to continue being distracted, and not focus on driving. All of the blue writing is the ideas that I came up with across two days on my mind map.

Once I finished my mind map, I transferred ideas that could be made into products onto the ideas page. I also had to brainstorm a few additional ideas as well.

New Warm-Up Game

For my warm up game, I wanted something that would be easy and fun for us to do. Since my group was meeting at a local restaurant, I knew we wouldn’t be able to do anything that involved activity, so it had to be speaking, or story related. While I was with my little next door neighbor across the street, who is four, I came up with the idea of “50 question story.” One person in the group would be telling a silly story, it could be make believe, or something that happened to them, and while they are telling it, everyone else asked a bunch of questions. At one point someone asked five questions before one sentence was complete! This made everyone laugh as we were all having fun and being introduced to one another. I also thought this was a valuable game because in idea generation, you do not want to be afraid to speak up and give your opinion or ask questions, which this game provides.

Session Organization

For the session, I gathered together a variety of different people with different backgrounds, and we met at Perkins and had a nice Dinner. One person, Arnie, was a car mechanic, who works on cars, another, Kim, was someone who had a desk job, and I had a mom and daughter pair, Julie and Kaitlyn, and Kaitlyn will be learning to drive in a year, so this is all very fresh in their minds. In the beginning we started with the new warm up game I came up with, along with the tiger and bear game. Trying to get everyone moving!

We started the idea generation by giving the how might we statement and allowing everyone to write on post it notes. We held this idea generation for 40 minutes. The total number of ideas we came up with was 48 ideas, for a total IPM of 1.2.

Sorting and Voting

For the voting, I allowed the volunteers to sort the ideas as how they like, and what they came up with was different categories. Examples of these categories was food, noises, things that spray, and electronics. Once everything was sorted, I gave everyone a highlighter and told them to place a dot on their top four favorite ideas. Once this was done, I collected all of these ideas, and asked for everyone to place one more dot on the cards I collected. I did this because I ended up with a lot of ideas that had one dot, and only one idea that had two dots. This way I could figure out what the top ideas were.

Top Ideas: