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.