Spring 2012 -- Creative Process -- P3

Innovation comes from generating many ideas, not just one great idea. For this project, students will learn techniques for exploring and synthesizing a wide variety of alternatives for a design space. Using the problem framing, data and opportunity statements from P2, student teams will generate on the order of 50 to 300 novel solutions. To supplement their own ideas, teams will also pose the questions as a task on Amazon Mechanical Turk and pay workers to generate ideas. From this broad set of possible future possibilities, teams will apply various synthesis techniques to pare their set down to five or six promising concepts.

Documentation of team brainstorm. Students will generate at least fifty unique solutions to the key questions raised in P2. They do not all have to be good ideas. Some should be. It's important to go for breadth here. Turn in photographs of whiteboard sessions and a text list of all the ideas.

Crowdstorm ideas. Post a task on Amazon Mechanical Turk so that people can help generate solutions for your problem. Include a short summary of the problem, key findings from the P2 analysis, and your opportunity statements. Pay 40 workers $0.25 to generate five unique ideas. This will yield about 200 ideas. Some will make no sense; many will be repeats. This is an experiment to find out if/how crowd can help generate diverse ideas. Turn in a list of crowd-produced ideas with a rating of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) next to each one.

Synthesis of concepts. Use one or more synthesis techinques and narrow down the idea space down to six possible solutions that can be mocked up in the next phase of the project. Turn in documentation of the synthesis process and elaborate why the team chose those six ideas to move forward.

During the in-class final critique for P3, students will briefly describe their ideation process and present the six most promising ideas. This critique session could lead to better or new ideas, so teams should be prepared to listen, take notes, and update their ideas before the mockup stage. Students should post their deliveraables (lists, photos, sketches, etc.) to the wiki page.

feb 9 Project 3 assigned
feb 14 Bring initial ideation output to class (approximately 50 ideas)
feb 16 Project 3 worksession, and tutorial on Mechanical Turk
feb 21 Ideation presentations (10 minutes includes time for Q&A). Upload the complete idea list (with synthesis) and your final six concepts to the wiki before class.

This is a group assignment for two-three people.

Criteria	Guiding questions	Check -	Check	Check +
Breadth of idea generation (40%)	Does your team generate lots and lots of diverse possible solutions to your problem?	The team generated the minimal number of ideas. They are obscure and repetitive.	The idea generation resulted in a broad set of possible solutions, making them amenable to synthesis methods. The ideas are understandable and unique.	The team produced many creative and diverse possible solutions. The ideas are thoughtful, diverse, and different than existing market solutions.
Effectiveness of online idea generation (30%)	Did your team create a clear task for workers on Mechanical Turk to generate ideas for your problem? Did you systematically read and rate each idea?	The team did produce no results from Mechanical Turk or the task was so poorly framed that it produced only noise.	The team launched a task on Mechanical Turk and got a range of interesting results. The ideas were rated and sorted and added to the overall list of concepts.	The team's Mechanical Turk task helped workers produce lots of creative and practical concepts. The task clearly explained the problem and prompted workers with a generative question.
Clarity of idea synthesis and six chosen ideas (30%)	Did your team use a formal synthesis technique to sort and analyze ideas? Did you synthesis process result in new ideas? Do the final six chosen ideas hold promise?	The team did not systematically analyze the space of solutions. The chosen concepts have a low probably of success.	The team systematically analyzed their ideas and chose concepts that have a high probably of success.	The team analyzed their ideas using one or multiple synthesis techniques. Concepts show promise and can make a big impact.