Me and my product development team have been working on optimizing Procomforts products for a while now. More specifically, we have been working on making a smart-wheelchair system that will solve the problems that patients are facing with regular wheelchairs and which will also integrate some of the companies requirements. You can read more about on the project blog.
Today we had the opportunity of having other students (studying in IT electronics) work for the same products, under our guidance. It mostly resembled what we did at the Scanamenities workshop, but only this time we were supervisor and not participants.
The day started with some breakfast and coffee, followed by a short briefing from one of our teachers. Afterwards we started presenting the cushions, the wheelchair system and the problems / requirements associated with them. We’ve also related to some keywords that should be kept in mind in the creative process.
After the introduction we started with some physical activity that woke people up and also stimulated the creative thinking a bit. Teams were created as random as possible, teachers and class-mates also being part of them so that they wouldn’t get stuck in moving forwards with the concepts.
The teams have started with individual brainstorms – writing individual ideas on sticky notes and focusing on laying down on paper any thought they had. This was followed by a group debate on the ideas, finding similarities or common points, each team ending up with several concepts that they can initially present to the product development team,supervisor teachers and Hans Georg, the owner of Procomfort.
<poza primele concepte>
The teams got interesting ideas and we were surprised that we didn’t think of some of them so far in our project.
The participants were not that many as expected but the event was a success because we acomplished our goals. Students from a different education had the opportunity to apply their knowledge on a project they did not know much about. They’ve ended up with interesting ideas that worth looking more into. Plus, this was just a pilot test for such events, as they will be more frequent in EAL from now on.
Our gain from this was that of getting a chance to organize and supervise a creative process. You can find out a lot about how to stimulate or kill creativity, how peoples interest levels rise and drop and of course, get insights into other peoples ideas and identify many possibilities from there.