Ideation is always my favorite part of the design thinking process. I love suspending judgment and practicality we are so trained to stick to and coming up with fun ideas to solve user-centered problems. I found the most difficult thing at first was to do just this though. I found my ideas were constrained to apps or adjustments to the current apartment building norms. Only once professor Luchs told us to come up with even crazier ideas did my team and I come up with really interesting ideas. I think that doing the crash course design thinking workshop earlier in the semester really helped this ideation session work smoothly. The added element in this ideation step was to interact with your teammates while you were coming up with ideas. We were encouraged to stop what we were doing to read what our teammates had just put up so we could be inspired and come up with even more innovative ideas.
I remember finishing this portion of ideation and wondering how we were possibly all agree upon a single idea. But after watching the video “Where good ideas come from” and Luchs reiterating the message that new and innovative ideas come from a combination of ideas, I realized that this process wouldn’t be too difficult. It also really helped to organize our ideas on a spectrum from would the consumer like it to love it and whether it would create or maintain relationships. I thought that distinguishing between creating and maintaining relationships would so important because we specify that our scope needs to have both of these satisfied with our idea. In addition, creating relationships isn’t the hard part, maintaining is, in my opinion.
After sorting our ideas and prioritizing which ends of the spectrum our project would focus on, we did multi-voting to see decide which ideas we would pursue. We came up with three distinct ideas, made of 2 sticky notes each.
- Various universal spaces could be used for yoga, parties, etc. & community centers that are kept neat and people are encouraged to attend events there
- Smart apartment that converts itself into a large entertainment space & retractable walls to merge rooms for events/hosting
- App with neighbors where you can elect to share your evening plans & a host-maker app based on the parent company