Project 2, continued again.

There was a vote, and my object was chosen to do the redesign.  The first thing we did was a battery of creative thinking exercises.   And while we're on the topic of teamwork, there was a homework assignment I missed earlier to discuss an IDEO video we watched as a class, right here on this blog.  I got all excited about writing this thing, and didn't realize we'd have required topics.  That's good though, creativity thrives through limitations.  Right?

The IDEO video, was a Nightline special about the IDEO design firm back in 1999.  I hadn't even been exposed to the idea of industrial design in the world, I thought engineers did everything.  But I was already keen on design back then, not necessarily the aesthetics, yet, but things like clickable jog-dials on Sony HandiCams, or good decisions like when digital cameras switched back from proprietary battery packs to double a's when rechargeable AA NiCads and Lithium Ions became available for cheap.  Anyway, the reason we watched this was to watch their innovation process.  The reason this show was interesting to the NightLine audience was because they were a huge profitable business that has a very loose and creative business model, the kind of thing that cubicle workers dream about.  If I had seen this back in '99, I might have chosen University of Cincinnati over Oklahoma,I thought engineers were the designers (a lot still are), and though both schools have an ME program, only Cincy has ID.  Whoops, I keep losing focus here.  They followed the team through the redesign of a shopping cart.  Besides some of the actual thinking exercises they use, the main point here was using ALL ideas to start with.  In other words, no self-editing, just amass all the ideas, then start trimming them down.  Bad ideas can lead often lead to brilliant ideas if you don't thrown them out to early.  You see an edge of the executive process in this video too, and that's the major editing of ideas presented.  Something that's pretty tricky to do in a group without an executive.

Here's the video on YouTube:

IDEO: Deep Dive

George P