Week 3 Reflection: Ideation

Week 3 for Team 3ST was a fun and creative week as we headed into the Ideation phase of the design thinking process.  For me personally, this is where I am most comfortable- letting my imagination fly.  For our stereotyping in education project we decided to meet via Google Hangout and collaboratively add to a mural.ly mural again.  We have found this to be a great collaboration tool to both organize our information and to create visual stimulation for our creativity.  This session was a neat one, as we were all on the Hangout together, adding our own ideas to the mural, but we were talking and bouncing ideas off of each other at the same time.  The energy was really cool as our different personalities and perspectives added to the mix.  Sara and Jose created four columns with our names on them, and we added ideas within our respective columns.  We went in with the idea that anything was possible.  It’s neat to imagine what you can do when the sky’s the limit.  Here is our collaborative mural of ideas:3ST Week 3 Mural.ly  We also added to our collaborative Google Doc this week.

After the ideas were in place, Sara, Jose and Matthew went in and grouped ideas into several different categories, which can be found on the right side of the mural in the four-squared grid.  The categories they chose for organizing the ideas were:  1. Use Media  2. Different Demographics  3. Community Involvement  4. Collaboration  This provided a way to look at our ideas collectively, in a way that allowed us to see any similarities between our ideas (as one more way to layer and combine), and also to see where our ideas differed.

After grouping the ideas, the group met once again to analyze possible constraints and narrow down the choices.  We had agreed to meet, via Hangout, Sunday at 5:30, but I had something come up with my children regarding transportation, and was not able to attend that session.  I did look at what was added to our collaborative document afterward, and I talked with Sara over the phone to get brought up to speed on the group’s ideas and thought process.  Sara described that the main constraints that came up for our ideas for practical constraints such as time, cost, and resistance either by parents or administrators.  Those are the constraints that I imagined would come up.  

Our team’s selected solution is a combination of several ideas we discussed during the second ideation phase. Sara, Matthew and Jose came up with the solution of creating an online, self-paced program for teachers and administrators to effectively learn about stereotyping in their classroom and school. This self-paced program will be game-based, and offer “badges” for teachers and administrators as they “pass,” or successfully complete different levels of the program.  This idea seems like an acceptable one, as it seems to be able to work around the constraints involving time, cost, and resistance.

As for my individual contributions to the team this week. . . I shared my notes on creativity and ideation with the group, I added my solution ideas to our mural and contributed to the discussion of possible ideas.

I’d still say the major challenges our group faced this week are time and location.  This week was especially tough for me to be a group member.  My family, particularly my children, had a lot going on, and I was not able to meet with my group via Hangout at our agreed-upon time.  This caused much stress for me, as I do not want to put the work load on my teammates, and I know they want to get their work done in a timely manner.  My stress level went up because I didn’t want to cause them any stress.  As a mother of three, though, most of the time I have to complete my school work either late at night or early in the morning, and that is not conducive to meeting with members of my cohort via Google Hangout.  So I’m afraid I may have frustrated my team this week.  I'm having a bit of trouble doing group work right now for that reason.

If I could do things differently I would take more time, as I find this to be such a valuable and fascinating process, and make sure we could meet face-to-face to really dig into the energy and ideas that are generated when we work together.  Team 3ST has a lot of passion for our students and this topic, and I think that I would genuinely enjoy an opportunity to work face-to-face with them on this.

If I were to apply this process with students or colleagues I really would do it much the same way, although I would make sure that we had adequate time in which to work.  I really love the mural.ly tool for collaboration, and would continue to use it.  Honestly, this stage of the design thinking process is so fun and productive!  I feel that our team went about it the right way.  Our mural, with its visual representation of our ideas, is really fantastic.

The creativity evidenced in our Ideation phase is a mixture of traditional and non-traditional.  We have some of the artistic, non-linguistic representations of ideas, but we also have words, colors, and a mashup of individual approaches that really allowed us to expand our ideas of what was possible in this arena.  It’s always liberating to blow the top off of a topic so that one doesn’t feel limited in what one can do.  Team 3ST is really good at this.  I’m looking forward to the next phase.