The ideation process was very taxing for my group all the way up until the very end, when things seemed to fall into place quite easily. After our first brainstorming session, we were confident that we could tackle the ideation for the second problem statement without issue. In reality, we struggled to create the same quantity of ideas that we came up with in the first round. We seemed, as a whole, more encumbered by doubts, judgments, and self-editing than we had been before. I think this was partly due to the fact that we realized in the middle of the brainstorming session that the new problem statement we were addressing was much more representative of our research and our personas. Although it was nice to know which direction we were next headed, this realization put pressure on us to bring our best ideas to the table.
We used the same approach as our first ideation session. We organized the stickies into categories where all the ideas shared similar characteristics. For this round, the sorting process made it very clear which ideas best suited the needs of our persona and addressed the new problem statement. Going into this round, I was convinced we would end up using one of our first two ideas to move forward, but after jumping into the second problem statement and brainstorming ideas, it became clear we would have a big decision to make.
Our team met to flesh out our final idea and choose which one we could use to move forward in the project. We made a simple pros and cons list for each idea that included such points as relevance to housing and importance to our demographic. We ultimately chose the final idea that we came up with because we realized it aligned with all of our previous steps most closely. Upon further review of the first two ideas we created, we realized that, while the ideas themselves were good and properly addressed the problem statement, we had strayed to far from our original scope, research, and interviews. The ideation stage was a wake up call to get us back on track and ready to roll for prototyping.