Day 5! Brain explosions, Idea's, Concepts, Post-it's!

Crammed full with action packed excitement in storms of brain!

After presenting our persona's and major design area's we were glad to receive some okay feedback. What I thought was quite odd was the fact that the feedback focussed around the presentation itself instead of the actual idea's. Which brings me to a point of critique: there was very little time to prepare this presentation and the point of it was to provide a halfway feedback mark, not to gain higher insight or understanding in the art of presentation itself. Good feedback was cut short (although this is understandable since we were not in a process of collaborative ideation) and there were "I like your persona's" galore. Also the critique that it would be better to let each member of the group take part in the presentation is something contrary to what I have learned, what makes more sense to me is that you let the best speaker, the one with the best skills for the job, do the work that is cut out for them. Anyway...

After the presentations we started a rapid ideation phase that was a lot of fun. Post it notes were flying all over the place and people were shouting idea's left and right. There was some need to redefine what we were doing every now and again, but we surpressed this as much as possible and just focussed on doing instead of talking about it. With the use of our three extreme personna's:

The Eco Warrior (anti-tech neo hippy with the powers of the earthmother)



The Tech Dude ("I care but I won't lift a finger, unless it's cool stuff")



The Sustainability Mom (cycles all over the place and packs her shit along with her)

we were able to gather a lot of ideas in our main design area's:

The Pollution Cape
Social Gathering to Make
Invisible Digital (protection)
Dry Cleaning Suitcase
Magic Cape System

An hour (or an hour and a half, or maybe two? All time seemed to dissolve) got us to about 120 ideas, big and small, that we were feeling quite happy about.

From this happy bunch we each picked the ten ideas we thought were the most interesting and fun to work on, even if that meant leaving the initial design problem. Some of the ideas got 3 stickers and most of the ones we picked centered around the cape and suitcase design spaces. Of the 120 ideas only 8 remained, and in some way or form these could be spliced onto and into each other, it seemed there was a pretty big unspoken consensus in the path we should take.

What there wasn't consensus in was the way in which the idea's should be handled from that point on. If we should conceptualize them further before putting them to paper, or if we should combine certain elements here and there.

In the meanwhile the Body Beamer Bar (a title chosen randomly for it's futuristic feel, nothing to do with the ACTUAL body beamer bar...) had already started. But we were heating up the discussion again, and then cooling it down by sitting in the cafeteria and penning our concepts onto the idea forms provided. We kept it simple. Some idea's could be made expansive or combined, but hours after the deadline and after a week of intense creation, discussion, argumentation and understanding we were in need of an end point (and perhaps a party!).