To start off, I had a hard time getting people together for a brainstorming session. There were a lot of conflicting schedules and last minute cancellations. In desperation, I went to the Students' Co-op that I had lived at for a couple of years. There it is always easy to find a group of people to do something interesting. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a wide variety of ages but at least they were all studying a variety of disciplines. Including myself, there were a total of 6 people: Kevin, Max, Kira, Alexandra, and Charlie.
Before I went I created a preliminary schedule that followed pretty closely to last lecture:
1) Improv warmup
2) Eat candy (very important) and basic brainstorming overview
3) Regular brainstorming session (10 minutes)
4) Negative brainstorm (10 minutes)
5) Roleplaying (2 characters, 5 minutes each)
6) Silent sort (7 minutes)
7) Each person chooses their 5 favorite ideas (5 minutes)
When I got the group of people together, between everyone's schedule we only had an hour to complete everything. I was concerned about having enough time, so, I decided to not do an improv warmup to make sure nobody would have to leave before we were done.
The first brainstorm did not go as well as I was hoping. Everyone was focusing on getting their drawing looking decent and taking up quite a bit of time explaining their ideas. The ideas were all good and nobody was being critical towards others but it was not close to 1 per minute. I went into this brainstorm expecting this to happen, which is why I wanted to do the negative brainstorm after this to get people to feel less inhibited.
The only nonblurry photo I took of the afternoon
The negative brainstorm seemed to go a lot better. The drawings became cruder, as well as the ideas. I really enjoy negative brainstorms and it seemed like everyone else was enjoying this one as well.
The roleplaying brainstorms also went pretty well but there weren't as many ideas being generated as the negative brainstorm.
Top 20 Ideas
These were the ones that got the most votes from everyone along with a few that were my personal favorites. They range from practical to bizarre to humorously sexual.
1. Max - Measures your water usage. If you conserve your water usage, money will be donated to water systems in Africa.
2. Alex - Multiple faucets for different liquids.
3. Me - Water is infused with beads (like orange goop) for cleaning grease from your hands.
4. Me - Faucet that acts like the drinking bird toy when it is flowing.
5. Max - Self explanatory.
6. Kira - Water comes out of faucet and makes bubbles.
7. Me - Water has an additive that cleans your sink (I realized afterwards that Rylie had a very similar idea in a previous post but I like the idea).
8. Alex - Water flow hits parts of the steel drum sink to make different notes.
9. Kevin - Self explanatory.
10. Charlie - Grey water system that washes your feet.
11. Max - Speaking faucet that makes you feel bad about yourself.
12. Max - Revolving sink area that would allow the user to see how the centrifugal forces mess with the water flow.
13. Max - Lasers measure the water level in the sink and project images on the ceiling based on the level.
14. Max - Turns on the faucet when it isn't being used.
15. Me - As the water flows out of the faucet, music is played.
16. Me - Faucet that aims at your crotch and sprays you.
17. Alex - I mainly think this one is too funny not to include in a University assignment.
18. Alex - Sponge attached directly to the faucet to help with washing hands.
19. Max - Warm water faucet lever.
20. Kira - Generates electricity from the flow in the drain pipe.
Part II:
I'm applying SCAMPER to the idea "measures your water usage and if you conserve money is donated for water programs in Africa."
Substitute - Instead of donating money, it could do something at home to encourage you to conserve, perhaps playing an audible chime when you get close to a pre-set limit that you'd like to enforce. Or offering a personal reward/punishment for conservative/over-usage.
Combine - Combine with other in-home "waste" tracking systems, like electricity usage. You'd have to be careful not to go too far with this or people would start to get anxious about how much of their personal lives were being tracked, though.
Adapt - You could add a visible meter (LED?) that allows the user to track their usage and see how much money they've donated. This could also be tracked online instead.
Magnify - This could be applied to an entire office, school, etc.
Put to other use - You could use something like this that tracks your purchases at, say, the office cafeteria - if you eat healthy, it would donate money to combat hunger/poverty. (I was also thinking tracking grocery store purchases... but we need a good one that helps people not just "cheat" and buy their junk food elsewhere...)
Eliminate - Eliminate the donation step and just have it play a chime when you're getting close to your preferred usage limit - I bet a lot of people would be inspired to change their behavior if the chime played halfway through the month or something. Just giving people information about being wasteful would be a good product idea, perhaps.
Rearrange - What if donating money to water-based charities gave you a discount on your water bill?