Ideation Reflection

Shifting from individual ideation and concept generation to a more team-focused approach has produced several benefits and realizations for our team.  When ideas are your own, it can be challenging to think critically about how to improve them.  While we were able to individually develop useful ideas for the fundamental look and function of products and prototypes, it was essential that we took steps to consider each team member’s perspective to promote effective ideation and take our ideas to the next level. To facilitate this, we required each group member to provide feedback as to how each individual product concept could be improved.  This method provided us with the understanding that designers must think beyond the essential function of the product to enhance the holistic product experience.  For example, after deliberating on the user experience for the self-cutting board, our team saw that a disabled person might have difficulty collecting the sliced food items from the board, even if the chief cutting function served its purpose.  With this fact in mind, we decided to develop a product variation which raises the board with adjustable legs, allowing a user to simply slide a bowl or plate under the cutter to collect food and ingredients.  This may not seem like a novel or particularly creative addition, but we found that it doesn’t necessarily require groundbreaking ideas to enhance product usability.  Instead, by focusing on taking small, specific product variations, we were able to take our crude designs and refine them into something that is both usable and effectual for our designated target market.  Ideally, our group can take lessons learned from this portion of the design project and apply them to the prototyping stage of the design process.