The brainstorming and ideation process was very challenging for me as an individual, though my team seemed to excel as a whole. Under the time crunch we had in class, I couldn’t seem to get my mind in gear to start grinding out things to write on the post-its. For every one of my post-its, my teammates each had three or four. I think this stemmed from my fixation on self-editing, which has always been a problem when it comes to creative thinking and writing. I find it almost impossible to put down anything less than a fully coherent representation of my thoughts on the page. Still, I think the process helped me to stretch my brainstorming muscles. It made me aware of this weakness so that I can hopefully overcome it in the future.
Between the yellow and pink (blue) post-it stages, my team and I managed to generate a number of ideas ranging from completely boring and utilitarian to absolutely ridiculous and unfeasible. I was pleasantly shocked at the variety of ideas and the different ways in which they addressed the problem statement. After graphing our ideas on the axis, we did not have time to finish forming/choosing our idea in class, so we decided to meet. We found it extremely helpful to categorize our ideas according to their similar traits, ending up with about 7 or 8 groups of ideas that shared a common theme. With these visually arrayed in front of us, we could then select the bits and pieces from each group that we wanted to incorporate into our final idea. Ultimately, we came up with two totally new ideas that built on a number of different post-its from the brainstorming session. I was incredibly pleased with how innovative and insightful these ideas were when compared against the initial post-its. I feel confident that, using this brainstorming methodology, we will be able to find a solution to any problem statement we choose to address.