brainstorm

Cheri Wang

5 min readOct 16, 2018

How might we make transporting personal belongings while going to the gym less of a hassle?

Individual Idea Generation

New Warm Up Game

For my warmup game, I came up with a game that’s a combination of telephone and charades. I had my participants stand in a circle with their backs facing each other, and the person who starts would face the person to next to them and act something of their choice out, and the person to the right would guess what it was, but instead of verbally guessing they would turn and face the person to their right and act out what their guess is. This continued until the last person was facing the person who started. It was fun to see how the original word progressed into the final guess.

Daniela starting the game, she acted out a pufferfish (left). Julia acting out her guess, a fish (right)

Session Organization

My four participants in this brainstorm were Julia, Kristin, Kacey, and Daniela. We met up in my apartment, and the brainstorm session was held here. The total duration of this brainstorm session was about 30 minutes.

Julia is a sophomore here at the U, and she is studying chemistry. Julia grew up in the Twin Cities in South Minneapolis, and really enjoys art and art museums. A fun fact about Julia is that she used to be a track star ☆ and ran in the MN State Track Meet multiple times!
Kristin is also a sophomore here at the U. She is studying neuroscience and hopes to become a orthodontist in the future. Kristin grew up in a suburb of the cities, but really enjoys living in Minneapolis now. A fun fact about Kristin is that she really enjoys meditation and strives to understand the world on a deeper level!
Kacey is a sophomore at the U as well, and is studying kinesiology on the pre-med track. When Kacey is not watching a hockey game or studying, she is interning with the Gopher Football team as an athletic trainer. A fun fact about Kacey is that she is allergic to about 10 things!
Daniela is a sophomore at the U, and she is studying political science and global studies. Daniela hopes to become fully fluent in Spanish and Arabic some day, and she really enjoys the outdoors and hiking. A fun fact about Daniela is that she spent her summer working as a camp counselor in Alaska!

Prior to this meeting, I told all 4 of my participants my “how might we” statement so they had some time to think of some ideas. Before the brainstorm session began, I had my participants play the telephone/charade game I came up with, as well as zip/zap/zop as a fun start to the session.

Overall, my brainstorm group spent about 20 minutes on the first step (idea generation) of the 124all method, and came up with 45 ideas total (an IPM of 0.56).

Following the 124all method, I had Kristin and Julia pair up, and Daniela and Kacey pair up. From there, as a pair, they chose their top 6 ideas and then drew those top 6 ideas on post it notes with titles and descriptions. The combined 12 post its were put up and the wall and then used for the next step: sorting and voting.

Sorting and Voting

Following the idea generation, I had my participants sort their 12 product ideas and my 9 from my own idea generation earlier into different categories. The categories they came up with were:

Water bottles
Bags
Apparel
Accessories
Bikes
Shoes

After sorting the products into different categories, I gave all of my participants 6 post it strips, 3 pink and 3 yellow to vote on the ideas with. The pink post it strips indicates the best ideas, and the yellow post it strips indicates the most interesting ideas.