Week 6 - Ideation #1

This week we started the Ideation process that will move us one step closer to finding a solution for our problem - Yay!

We refined our How Might We:

"How might we help office workers recover effectively throughout the workday."

On Sunday's Milab class, as part of the course, we participated in a very eye-opening and creative ideation session to get our creative juices flowing. The goal was to start thinking outside the box and coming up with crazy and innovative ways to solve our "How Might We".

We started by writing down, on colorful sticky notes, any idea that came to mind - from the most "out there" to the most obvious and practical. There were only two rules - never say "no" to anyone's idea, and always keep building on each other's ideas. In this way, we got to practice our teamwork as well as our creativity, and test how far we could take our solution.

We ended up with a whiteboard full of stickers:

We then came up with many different ideas during our first brainstorming session and divided them into three groups: practical, impractical, and surprising/innovative.

We noticed that our solutions focused on different aspects that can help re-energize office workers: drinking/eating, going outside, relaxing during office breaks, standing up or doing a type of physical activity as well as solutions that help workers be reminded to take these breaks:

We inspected all these different solutions and decided to focus on just three:

1. A clock divided into different activities that reminds office workers to take different types of breaks (Drink water, make coffee, stand up, go outside etc’).

2. A collective bracelet (or object) that changes colors gradually as the day goes by and can only be reset back by taking breaks

3. A ball that wants to be passed, suggests different types of activities that can be done with it and only unlocks a person’s screen after a certain amount of time passes or it has been thrown a certain number of times.

Next, we started to map out our Persona's user story through a timeline that follows his day - from the moment he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep, in order to locate the exact moment(s) in his day where we wanted to intervene and make the most significant impact:

Finally, we decided we wanted to focus on that moment of time, about an hour after eating lunch, where our Persona is only starting to feel tired but is not yet exhausted. We believe that if we can intervene there, we can help our users recover effectively and never reach the dreaded point of exhaustion.

With all of this in mind, we're excited to go into next week's second ideation session and see what more we can come up with!