Week 3

This was one of my favorite weeks yet. First, we started off with a quick video series on Dateline about a design team called IDEO. IDEO is revolutionary in not only their designs themselves but the process by which they procure their designs. They start with a diverse team of biology students, graphic designers, businessman, etc. They believe that if you pull together a team that represents many disciplines, you'll come up with diverse ideas. When we broke up into our own diverse groups, the same thing was evident once we started generating ideas. We mimicked the same brainstorming method that IDEO conducts. Basically, we just through a bunch of random ideas on a sheet of paper, both realistic and unrealistic. According to IDEO, there is no such thing as a bad idea. If an idea is too far out there, there's some idea that can be extracted and used elsewhere. Our group came up with a lot of productive ideas that I believe will help us once we advance into the later stages of the project.
Thursday was a blast. I had a lot of fun taking random items and trying to find a different use for them. Eventually it got so absurd that we came up with a squirrel trap for a hardhat. But that's real life. You design things to solve a problem and some solutions may be already taken so you gotta think outside the box. Hence, squirrel trap.