Productive Brainstorming!

Today during the product development class, I had experienced a very productive brainstorming section. This technique is introduced by the industrial designer in our group. In an industrial design world, brainstorming is one of the major part of its process. So these designers know how to best do it properly.

The topic that we brainstormed today is about finding 3 useful product concepts for our group. We are going to use these concepts to develop the final concept of the product. The brainstorming section is followed on these step.

1. Industrial designer acted as a mediator of the section.
2. Divided our team into two group, 3 person per group. Each group should contain people from different backgrounds.
3. Give two stacks of post it notes. Two colors per group
4. Set up a topic on brainstorming. In this case, he ordered each team to write down coding process and material for the overtube as much as we can in the first five minutes.
4. After 5 minutes, switch first team to work on second team post it and also another way around. In during the way, we will also learn from another group's idea to generate more ideas
5. Brainstorming for another 5 minutes
6. Merge two groups into one and also merge all the contents on the post it note
7. Group same ideas. Make them coherent with others
8. Cut off bad ideas
9. After all these steps, we get ideas on materials and coding processes
10. Bring up our homework about idea of mechanism of overtube.
11. Select good mechanism and merge them with material and coding processes

At the end of the meeting, we finally came up with 3 great ideas that will be a fundamental on our further research. From what I have learned from doing this, I'm going to use this section in other brainstorming section.

Great Presentaion of the year 2008

Personally, I like the presentation. I think that it's an art plus business plus creativity. The way that these great presentation are created is completely different from normal bullet point presentation. They use more pictures, less words, and insightful idea. I hope that someday, I will improve my creating presentation skill and create a good presentation as one below.

THIRST

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

This is an educational presentation exploring humanity's water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage. It is designed to act as a stand-alone presentation. Enjoy!


SlideShare Link

Creativity on the US. TV series

Lately, I spend a lot of my time watching US. Tv series, especially, the series called "Lost". Lost is one of the best TV show according to some magazine. Right now, it is going to start there fifth season on this coming January. I watched Lost on abc.com which provides us a really great content. ABC online let you watch all of their TV series in high definition and you can also watch entired season from the first season to the latest season of Lost without paying anything except watching their short commercial.



I'm very impressed my the creativity of producers, writers of Lost. The reason that I said that is because they can produce something that keep me want to watch more and more for over forty hours. I started watching from the very first episode on Lost's first season and now I'm at the third or forth episode of its third season. I spent roughly forty hours watching. This is quite a time consuming for me but I can't help. I consider myself addicted to it already.

OK, so why it is so addictive and why do I think that the concept of Lost is very creative.

1. Lost was created around an unusal scenario so it give them a large room to add more creativity stuff into the story
The basic story of Lost is about a group of people who flew on the same plane but accidentally that plane crashed on the far far island. There are lots of supernatures, unexpected group of people, monster, miracle and etc happen in this island.

2. All of the characters in Lost have its own interesting background
Ths story is not just about how to survive from plane crash on the island but it's also about background of those people. Writers did a very great job on creating a complex conflict of characters' background, unpredictable linkage between them and hidden secret that nobody wants to talk about. For example, Jack who is the main protagonis of the series used to be a doctor who had lost his father in Sydney. Another character named Analucial, she used to be a cop but just changed a job to be Jack's father personal bodyguard. This is very complex!

3. The story tends to add more question and unpredictable situation
The key to make an addictive story is to keep throwing more and more question or unanswer events into the story. When each episode ends, I as an audience always feel left behind and want to know more, want to know the answer of the question that is just left at the end of the last episode. I think that Lost's writer did a terrific of on this. However, sometime, I think that it is too much for me becuase they keep making new question without answering anything. This can make audience feel bored and disappointed in the story. Anyway, I believe that they will have all the reasonable explainations for the questions that they set up. Otherwise, I will feel betrayed by them.

In summary, I think that there are creativity in everywhere. It just depends on us to look at it or not, to try to understand and analyse them or not. This one is just one of the thing that I try to look at it and try to find a beauty of creativity inside it.

Little step to be more Creativity and Productivity

As I posted on the Creativity in Business's web board, lately I experience something very bad. I hurt my feeling a lot and I feel like I don't want to do anything include school work, reading, researching or even thinking creatively. So I pretty much stuck in the same environment for quite sometime. I know that being in that surrounding will not make me feeling better. On the other hand, it will make me feel worse and worse.

So I decide to make some changes to boost my productivity and creativity level back to the proper level. I think that the easiest way to start is to start from something small like the place that I live. The reason that I feel bad and uncreative may come from the fact that I stay in the same place, same condition for quite sometime. Here are what I'm going to do to make myself back to where I should be

1. Cleaning my room. I spend most of my working time in my own room. I don't want to blame that part of my uncreativity may come from sitting in this room. So I need to make a change with my room to create new work environment that suit myself properly




















2. Changing to work outside more. I promise to myself that during the weekday, even though I don't have a class. I will go to university and work from student lounge. I found out that working in different environment help me for be more productive and creative.

3. Lastly, I'll try to create a mood for creative work. As I read for creative blockbusting, listening to music, drawing, or fragrance can help me to be more creative so I will try to find the best activity for me

Brainstorming For My Work

I believe in power of creativity and tools that I always use for my creativity are drawing and brainstorming. As a kid, I love to draw. I drew cartoons, animation on everywhere from my house wall to my lecture note. I feel that when I draw something on the paper, it give me more of creativity juice running and I like to see my own work on the paper. It make me feel very good to see my own work on the paper.

Also brainstorming is a great tool to keep my idea flow. I've read on article about self brainstorming concept. It is about start brainstorming with yourself first, before you go to the meeting. Doing this will give a lot better in creating alternative and finding solution for the problem. Below are examples of my self brainstorming plus drawing that I did for my product development class. I'm going to have a meeting on Monday so I did my own brainstorming before I need to share these ideas with my teammate.

Sustainability in business ??

Today, I listened to the lecture from our guess speaker, Michel L. Belland. It was very inspiring. First I have to say that before I came to the class, I’ve never had any thought about green, environmental protection or even sustainability in the business context. I thought that those tree hugging issues are very far from myself. However, this class completely change my perspective on these issues.

He talked and gave us a lot of explicit examples that I’ve never thought about. For example the way to imitate the structure of the nature creation can help designers to design something that is more sustain and create a huge profit back to the company. Or the way that nature works in non-linear fashion, it always work in cycle so as your business process that they should be created around the concept of circle or spiral. All of the samples are intriguing, if I haven’t heard these kinds of story from other places, I would not believe that these are true and practical.

In class, it also spark my creativity on producing new products. Since, my family business is in the textile industry. We are yarn manufacturer. The concept of entropy pattern and recycling material can be adapt with our new product in my different ways. Here are my ideas.

- Yarns that have controlled colors. Normally for the dyed yarn, customers always want to have a very steady or even fix colors. So any variation in color is considered a defect. If we can create a dyed yarn that have controlled variation in colors and we use natural dying stuff, we can sell it to more environmental concern customers. Or we can even create a pattern on the fabric using the variation in yarn’s color. This will create some effect similar to entropy design that Michel talked about.

- What can we do with used yarn or fabrics. Can we correct them and reproduce it back in to yarn? These questions may not be answered here but I think that it can lead to some research that my company needs to pay attention on it.

- Returning sample from customer is also a good idea because in my business, we need to send tons of catalogues to our customers. They are on the largest promotion cost for our company so if we can create some process that give opportunities for customers to send it back. This will help reduce a good chuck of cost.

These ideas are great but only problem that conjure up in my head is how to convince all the people in the company, especially upper management level to understand the benefit and the real return from being sustainability and environmental friendly. This question was asked by one of our classmate but I didn’t satisfy with the answer. I think that top down management will pay a very important role in implementing this kind of idea into the company and also that company needs to be in a very stable situation enough to think about something else other than survival of the company and how make money. Especially when the world’s economic goes down like this, I hardly see how to implement or create awareness in the company about environmental issue.