Reverse Brainstorming

This week we had a guest lecturer, Eugene Shteyn, come in to hold a reverse brainstorming workshop. Each group had to list out 100 specific problems their project faced. Then each person from the group picked out ten short term problems and 10 long term problems that they thought were the most valuable ones to tackle. Next we looked at the overlap of everyone's choices to find our most critical challenges. My group struggled with the exercise a little. We made it up to about 76 problems but it was a lot of rewording of what we already had and we had a hard time listing out things specifically. Our design has a long way to go. I think one of the issues is that even though we are all in agreement about the concept - an interactive installation that also monitors human activity for security purposes - none of us have a clear idea about what that should look like.
I think the reverse brainstorming did help us in the sense that we were able to define a lot of our problems and see what concerned everyone the most but at the same time it was quite overwhelming to be faced with a giant list of problems. Some (most?) are not easily fixed and some we can not fix at all. Things that concern us are: what form our project will take, if people will respond to it, how will this device use/collect energy, how do we make this weather proof/thief proof, how do we display the information gathered, how do we make it repairable, and how do we actually get this done in the days we have left.
We began to tackle this list of problems by grouping items together to further break it down and then going back through the condensed version and separating problems vs concerns. Problems are fixable things and concerns are things we can't necessarily fix but that we should keep in mind while designing our project.
My biggest concern for the project is how people will react to it- will they enjoy it, will they be annoyed by it, will the novelty wear off in a few months, can we make it meaningful to them? To address some of these concerns I am going back to Hamtramck to talk to some of the people in the community. Without the input of people in the neighborhood I feel like we would be starting this project backwards. Hopefully I can get a better idea of what they will respond to most during this visit.
Another big concern of everyone's was if we were being too ambitious and what if we can't get this project done. We have come to the consensus that we should push ourselves to create something that actually works early on and then spend the rest of the semester fine tuning and improving upon it.