Ideas? Not enough ideas? Read on.
Time is something we don’t have a lot of here at the MediaLAB, that any LABber would affirm. Charlie Mulholland worked his magic on the group of us yesterday, pushing us to develop ideas. He said 100 ideas to build toward a concept were simply not enough. As Charlie says, 99 out of 100 ideas are “rubbish”.
In part through the use of the ‘75 tools for creative thinking‘ deck, Charlie’s mashup of methods triggered us to develop over 200 ideas in thirty minutes (naturally, the focus was on quantity not quality). After an hour of introducing the concepts of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, this thirty minute sprint put our theory into practice. After the seemingly ridiculous number of Post-It notes were created, we had to make sense of it all. Convergence time: Here’s Myrthe taking a pass at what we discussed for the last hour of our session.
As time is so limited, our goal this week is to converge into three workable concepts. To achieve this, we’re seeking as much input from our colleagues here at the lab. As it concerns our project, our interviews and continuing digital ethnography are helping us to define requirements and functionality for the concepts. In order to build three complete concepts to present to our innovation partner in two week, we still need at least 100 more ideas for our third concept. For next Tuesday, we have to transform these hundreds of ideas into three lo-fidelity visualized models, or paper prototypes. The clock is ticking!