Team Design Ideas
Team Design Ideas
group assignment
goal
To exercise various idea generation techniques on a problem from your contextual inquiries. To filter ideas based on what you have learned about about your selected user community. To clearly present design ideas and why they are important. This is a group project.
problem selection
From your User Problem Assignment, select a problem for which your group will generate possible solutions. For the problem you have selected, produce a VAOW goal statement.
  • Verb - an action verb like improve, reduce, optimize, enhance, etc. This should be an action that will make things better for your users.
  • Attribute - some attribute such as: size, readability, cost, excitement, etc. This is some property of the object of interest.
  • Object - The thing that is to become better because of your actions. This might be a website, a robot, a newspaper, medical care, a taxi, etc.
  • Who - From who's perspective will this get better.
Examples:
  • Lower the cost of taxi rides for people landing at JFK airport.
  • Raise learning retention of third graders for their parents

There should be a paragraph in your report giving your VAOW statement for the problem you selected along with a rationale for why you selected that problem. Ground your rationale in observations of your user groups.

idea generation
Use three of the idea generation techniques that you studied earlier to generate possible solutions to your problem. For each technique generate 10 ideas. Write 2-3 sentences explaining each idea. In your report show the ideas generated from each technique.
solution selection
Take your 30 generated ideas and select 3 for deeper consideration as part of your design process. For each of the 27 ideas that you did not select, write a short paragraph describing what information from your user observations caused you to discard this idea. Please make specific references to specific items in your user observation reports.

For each of your selected solutions you should prepare a paragraph that describes your solution and about 1/2 page of rationale for this solution based on your user observations.

presentation
For your critique in class prepare 1 slide describing the problem you are attacking and 2 slides for each of the 3 solutions you have selected. For each solution there should be 1 slide describing the proposed solution and 1 slide giving the rationale for the solution (why would this be good). This should be a total of 7 slides. Select one of your group (who has not presented before) to be the presenter and one of your group to be scribe for the critique comments generated in class.
report
Take your VAOW statement, your generated ideas, their descriptions and their reasons for being discarded and produce a Word document that should be submitted through LearningSuite on or before the due date.

One member of your group submits the group report to LearningSuite

grading
You will be graded on:
  • The interest and value of the problem described by your VAOW statement
  • The quality and range of the ideas that you generated (I recommend you generate more than 10 and then retain the 10 best).
  • How well you utilized the various idea generation techniques.
  • The quality of your report and your justifications for rejecting 27 ideas. It is very important that you justify your rejections from the observations that your group did.
  • The quality of your report and presentation on the 3 ideas you retained. It is very important that you justify selecting these ideas from the observations that your group did.