The perfect match.

Last week was explorative and expansive. This week was narrowing and contracting.

After all the work we put onto coming up with lots of possible ideas, it finally came the time to select them and start filtering to find the one that solved better the problem and had what the user wanted and needed.

To do this, the teacher gave us instructions on how to do the filtering process: we were going to use some cartesian planes to rate the ideas, evaluating each of them in two axis correspondent to two categories.

But first, we had to make a list of all of them and filter them by relevance. Our list was quite long, since we almost completed the 64 ideas of the Lotus Flower and also did the SCAMPER so it took us a long time to write them all and then discard them by relevance.

After that, we were expected to decide the criteria on which to evaluate the resulting ideas. So after some discussion in the team, we reached the conclusion that we were going to evaluate:

• Originality and viability
• Sustainability and Lawfulness
• Cheapness and durability
• Multifunctionality and compactability

We only made it this far before our time went up and we decided to continue next class. But nex class did not came, since the teacher prepared a presentation with some other professor about prototyping.

And then the next-next class came, another task was upon us and we were late.

So we had to move faster than ever and finish the previous excercise before we could move on to the next step. So we created the cartesian planes with the two axis, we had 4 of them, and we moved all of our ideas to start evaluating them and start discardign them as we went. We actually did this process pretty fast.

The first filter was de originality and viability plane, as the instructions said, we evaluated according to a 1–5 scale on both axis and positioned the ideas where both our evaluations meet. Once we finished this, our selection mode was to discard those ideas that were on the negative scale and only keep the others, so they “passed” to the next evaluation. Out of 43, we kept 38.

The next filter was the sustainability and lawfulness axis. The process was the sameand this time we kept 33.

Then came the cheapness and durabilty axis, in here we eliminated a lot more, since this axis evaluated the materiality and manufacture possibilities of the ideas, so many were not able to be produced or they were but the approximate cost was way too high. We were left with only 21.

Finally, the “plus” axis, this was to evaluate those ideas which apart from meeting the basic requierments brought another thing to the table, we evaluated in terms of multifunctionality and compactability. After the final filter, we got only 10 left.

After that, and keeping in mind the next activity (which requierd us to have only 3 ideas left), we discussed and voted, and after several votes, we decided on those 3.

The next activity consisted in another evaluation of the ideas, but this time, it was not exactly against the requierments, instead we evaluated taking our users tastes and reactions into account. So there were 3 categories to evaluate:

• Energy: which ideas have pre-existing passion around them?
• Excitement: which ideas would generate buzz and grow participation?
• Ease: which ideas can you pull off quickly and inexpensively?

Besides that, we also had to draw a little sketch of how the idea might look.

The first one was the one that came up from the SCAMPER and we used the sketch we already had. On the evaluation part, we judged that this idea would be high on the energy side, since its innovative and probably will be very accepted between the community, on the excitement part we judged a little less since it really didn’t set a call to action because mostly everything will be solved. An finally on the ease category we placed it even lower, this since it would be the most expensive out of the three.

Then came the orchard-shelter. This had a similar energy level as to the one before, mostly because of the same things. It was on the excitement thing that this idea was above, because as an orchard it needs the user to take action and actively participate to make it happen. Finally, on the ease side, this was just a little above the previous one, since its also pretty expensive.

The last of our ideas was another one from the SCAMPER, and it was to re-purpose the shelter (after its life cycle has ended) as a homeless living place. This, unlike the other, was very low on the energy levels, since probably the community won’t be particularly interested about the re-purposing of the shelter. On the excitement, we got a little less than the first one, since there was also little to none participation from the user. Finally, about the ease, this got low too, as it would be double investment, first to produce it and another later to repair it and leave it in good conditions.

With that, we finished this week’s work. It was a lot, specially since we got back on things, but ultimately we got back on track and everything was sorted out.

But, this time I was left with a doubt, because watching the other teams, they were delivering the ideation of a system of objects at this point (which was actually what was expected from us at the end of the semester), and we only had 3 different ideas of the same thing. So I started to wonder if we would have to design the shelter and other two things or given the complexity of the shelter it would count as a system.

As for the learnings, with only weeks before the semester is over, I would like to, once again, talk about all the tools a got to learn along this journey, the ones before, the ones this week and not only the tools themselves but their impact on the process and how they make everything much more easy and smooth. This time we contrasted the ideas against the requierments and I usually remember this part of the process as quite boring and time-consuming, but this time it was smooth and we only went with the flow of the tools so that they led us to where we needed to and facilitate everything.

This week I learned that not everything has to be difficult to be useful or meaningful.