Once we highlighted promising ideas, we came up with about 25 more iterations off of these. These are shown in this document: New Brainstorming Ideas. Then we went through and highlighted our top/most promises from these. Our final set of brainstorming ideas can be seen under “New Ideas” on the miro board.

After the initial brainstorming we went through and decided on some of the more promising ideas to think about more and brainstorm variations/ideas on. Initially we did this by removing ideas we thought were not feasible in the scope of this class. These ideas are seen highlighted in red on this document: Brainstorming Ideas Refined 1.

Remaining we still had a lot of ideas that were similar, so we used our miro board under “Sorted Brainstorming Ideas” to organize them into different categories such as handles that can attach, seat belts, wheelchair transportation, etc.  From this we went through as a team and highlighted ideas in each category that we thought were most promising to iterate on in the next phase.

Here’s a link to a pdf of our initial brainstorming ideas:

Initial Brainstorming Ideas

As a team we came up with about 100 ideas based on the problem areas we defined: stability&balance, use of devices, vehicle height, handles, doors, body of vehicle, vehicle seat, process, medical conditions.

Reflection:

What went well? What went less well?

• As we were brainstorming ideas we found some of our product categories were easier to come up with ideas for. We were able to think of many ideas to account for the height of the car but struggled to come up with ideas for helping the person maintain balance. We also struggled to come up with ideas once we had a bunch already. We found that many of our ideas started to overlap in many aspects and were very similar. 

What seems promising about your project direction at this point? What seems… less promising? (Keep in mind you’re not evaluating ideas yet!)

• There seems to be a wide variety of areas that we could choose to focus on in terms of what part of the process or the vehicle to design a product for. Some of the ideas that we came up with were a bit out there so the range of possibilities for the solution to the problems that were determined in the “Problem Definition” assignment might be limited, even with the ~100 ideas the team came up with during brainstorming. 

What (if anything) might you need to research in order to improve your ideas for your next iteration of brainstorming?

• In order to improve our ideas we might look into existing products on the market. Knowing more about existing products could help us to get inspiration and make sure that we are heading down a path that is novel. As we continue to brainstorm it might help to learn more about the structural components of a car and the materials it’s made out of. We have a fair amount of ideas that connect onto the vehicle, so it will be helpful to know what parts of a car are more feasible for connections.