(1)A brainstorm is not the right approach for every question. A well executed brainstorm can be an effective approach to get a lot of ideas, quickly and fluidly. However, a brainstorm is not the right solution to every problem!Sometimes there is a tendency to try and brainstorm around problems that should be solved by other methods. Another frequent mistake is to use the term brainstorm to vaguely describe a wide variety of problem-solving approaches.
How can we be sure to select the right problem-solving approach to apply in any given situation?
How can we build out or company lexicon to accurately describe our various problem-solving approaches?
(2)Creativity versus problem-specific expertise: Depending on the problem to be addressed, sometimes it is more helpful to have brainstorm participants with in-depth technical, market, or other problem-specific knowledge. Other times you may want to cast a very wide net by focusing on getting “out there ideas”.
How can we enrich our brainstorms by intentionally selecting the right participants?
How much contextual knowledge do the participants and facilitator need?
(3)The brainstorm is all about asking the right question.In order for a brainstorm to be useful, the question to be answered needs to be well worded. If you start the question with “how might we….”, and you are able to think of four or five ideas immediately, you probably have a good brainstorming question.
How might we ensure that we have good “how might we” questions BEFORE the brainstorm begins?
Does the brainstorm facilitator need to frame the “how might we” questions or can we find good ways for participants to contribute as well?
(4)A suggested list of rules to follow when brainstorming. Here is a brief list of rules which can be quite helpful to ensure the brainstorm stays quick, fluid and produces a lot of ideas.
Encourage wild ideas
Defer judgment
Build on each other’s ideas
Focus on quantity
For more resources on how to conduct good brainstorms, a quick internet search will turn up more than you can handle!
My only regret I had when moving to India was not having enough room in my luggage to pack my Whole Earth Catalog (the book that Steve Jobs mentions at the end of his speech). I used to have this book next my contact case so that it would always be the first thing I saw clearly every morning.
Fortunately for me when I moved into my apartment, I see this every morning from my room:
The picture is a bit blurry but the sign says "Hungry and Foolish". Now I don’t believe in fate but sometimes I question if it really does exist. What are the chances that a company would call themselves this and then decide to setup shop across my window?
At any rate, the team decided to pay these guys a visit and I was extremely impressed. They are a bunch of ex-marketing folks who now do a range of designs from products to services. They don’t take themselves too seriously even though they do great work and are extremely creative.
It’s great to see that there are good designers in this city and a community in which we can call upon. I realize having lived here for a few months now that it’s critical that we don’t lose our creative spirit.
Posted by Elyse Marr
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:41:00 GMT
In my last post, I gave you some background on human factors research and my vision as an experience designer. With that in mind, today I want to bring you into an empathy session, a large part of our design process.
I am going to share a short story that I experienced in field about Manoj, a mother with 7 day-old hypothermic twins. I was visiting an NGO that focused solely on Kangaroo Mother Care as a community effort for infant care, where family members would provide skin-to-skin contact for warmth in their home. I was trying to take elements of these practices to develop our at home unit. Yet this NGO is a rare success where KMC has been effective solution for community behavior change.
If you have insights from your experiences that tie-in to the story, please share. KMC is one of our largest design challenges. I would love to bring your thoughts to our design table as well.
From Brilliant Bangalore,
Elyse
I followed the smeared red trail of paint on the cool compacted cow-dung ground. It led to a series of concentric circle into the center of the home where the sunlight was pouring in. Entering, I felt like I was crossing a series of chambers, and levels of intimacy. I arrived at a chula beside a door where embers were burning. There was a mixture of sculpted triangular logs made from cow dung pellets, a few pieces of brightly printed consumer product cardboard, and gnarled forest firewood. This was a small pristine chula, and particularly pleasing in form. This chula was obviously not for cooking, but for ceremonial purposes. It was a provider of heat: a protector from evil spirits that might linger with visitors.
I was asked to first warm my hands, then my feet. So, I took off my shoes and socks and one by one I put each extremity near the flame of the chula. Only then was I allowed to greet the mother and newborns. I met them half-way along this red trail – I greeted them at their door threshold, and they emerged from the dark quarters, not quite leaving the room. As I looked past the sheath of smoke filtering before me, Manoj Kumari and Kanchen Shukla were seated side by side, each holding a infant: Sowyma and Aniket.
As a new mother, Manoj was committed to a “saur”, or confines for a time of purification and childcare right after delivery. Only Kanchen, her sister-in-law, could tend to Manoj and the twins for first seven days after birth.
I had come to Manoj’s house with Saksham community mobilizers who taught Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) to new mothers. KMC is skin-to skin contact that anyone can provide to a child. To put it simply, an adult’s chest keeps a constant body temperature and acts like a warmer for the newborn.
Manish, the man who accompanied me from Saksham’s timidly listened to my questions about the children off to the side.Suddenly he emerged from the courtyard, seating himself directly facing the door of the sour square on with a strong presence.I stopped my interview to see what I had said wrong. The questions I asked about the children had led Manish to believe these 1.7 kg were hypothermic and not being treated with KMC. We stopped the interview – and Manish immediately moved to action.
Cold to the touch. Blue in the lips. Yes, Yes, both of the twins are blue in some areas. The women’s engagement was no longer masked by shyness, even with many men around. They were listening.The urgency was evident. What can we do? I can teach you kangaroo mother care.
Swiftly moving, succinctly speaking. Manish confirmed that the children had caught “cold fever,” then he provided instructions for KMC. He moved his arms slowly to his sides, closing his hand together, and gave a nod for them to reenter the sour. His job was finished.
Try. Try now. The men left the inner quarters of the house, and I was the only woman left to help and observe the first KMC trial with Manoj and Kanchen. I waited outside the sour, unsure if I could go into the room and terrified of all the unknown practices that were around me. Manoj went first; I could see her backlit silhouette seated on the bed against the yellow haze of smoke and kerosene luminance.
Come. Come in. I was allowed to enter, since I had warmed my feet and hands, and the strict days of confinement in the “saur” were over. Yesterday, the twins had been held in the circle of red paint on the seventh day of life to receive their first blessing from the sun and family waters. As I hesitantly walked in, I looked for reassurance on Kanchen’s face that was illuminated by the yellow cast light. Even without language, I could understand her eyes asking me to help.
From under her pallav, I heard her unbuttoning her blouse. Together, we undressed Aniket. I gently pulled off his cap as she caught his head, which was smaller than a tennis ball. The delicate skin on his head was loose and translucent. Then she untied the small gauze cloth from around his waist, which was no larger than my wrist. She placed the child under her pallav, across her open blouse, and I took her black shawl and covered her and the child. She pulled at arm, telling me to sit by her.
I looked across the room to the sole light source: the kerosene lamp was the sitting on a wooden stool at the head of the mother across the room. As I timidly went over to ask if she needed anything more, I looked at Manoj again noting that she had properly set up KMC by herself. I nodded to her, good; you’ve done everything right. Manoj seemed at ease; she showed a delicate smile and a let go a breath of release. By that time, she had the child lying on her chest, sleeping. Manoj was a provider of meter, radiation, and protection. I sensed no distress as I looked at Sowyma (the second of the twins). She had hair all over her body and face that her body developed to try and keep warm. Her black hairs on her head were matted down on her skin with mustard oil and I could vividly see the tracing of her cranial suture lines that were stilldeveloping around her delicate head.
With the women enveloped in the darkness of the Shivgarh night, I tried to quietly exit the room. Kanchen caught my arm, asking me not to leave, to stay with her. Immobile for the children, Manoj and Kanchen were captive under the reminder of the vulnerability of their fragile children. I must go, I told her. I will see you again tomorrow, not knowing if she understood me. Holding my arm, I looked at Kanchen’s glowing golden-lit face again smiling her beautiful warming grin, yet her forehead wrinkled with a slight fear. In my gaze, I tried to tell her to keep her spirit, and to focus that energy on being mindful of these children. In return, I will keep my hope and spirits up with her in my mind, focusing energy to my responsibility to her. In those moments of life, I find myself saying a form of prayer in daily thought. Only when I nodded slowly up and down and looked in her eyes, did she release my arm.
As my foot touched the cool dung floor once more, I caught eye of older women peering down at me from the top of the brick wall in the adjoining house. I moved towards the door seeing that men were slowly re-entering the house for the night, I averted my eyes back down to the ground, said my thank you, and exited the house.
Just a couple of thoughts I have had about our work here in India. Feel free to reply with comments.
(1) We underestimate the power of our environment on our design choices.
From the building, to the lighting, to the décor, to the city, to the country we are in, our environment influences our design decisions. How should we set up the office so we design well for our customers? Should we build a prototyping bus and head out to our customers houses and clinics?
(2) Fear of failure is a major driver in India. Additionally, there is a strong tendency to associate project failure with personal failure.
There is an intense personal pressure on each person to “succeed” in the eyes of their peers, family and communities. How can we use this awareness to help us find the right early adopters for our product and the right people to help us navigate the system?
(3) The key area is less often in the product design and development area, but in the commercialization and monetization part.
Many products use technology to successfully address technical problems, but the difficulties lie in commercializing, marketing and getting people to actually use the product. Encompassing the technological problem is always a business problem and then a human problem. How can we focus on the commercialization with as much vigor as we’ve focused on the technical solution? How are we addressing the “human problem” now that we have the technical solution?
(4) There are no replacements for touch points in the field. It is possible to put out an early stage product with enough caveats and precautions to start getting real feedback early on.
After a certain point in the development, do we start to shy away from sharing our prototypes? Can we be more creative about how we get “real world” feedback without ever putting anyone’s life in danger?
(5) Put out a product that is at least as good as the other options out there and which is LOCALLY relevant.
How can we identify what the real comparison points are for a our product (when there really are no products like it out there yet)? What products out there can be considered similar along certain aspects and thus become valuable for comparison? How can we make our product locally relevant?
(6) Will the mother be able to drive the market, product design and usage completely?
The mother – child relationship seems to me to be the strongest relationship our product and company is dealing with. How can we harness the power of the maternal instinct to drive the product design, development, marketing, sales, usage, feedback etc? I think mothers are the stakeholders with the strongest motivation and could potentially power the entire engine (read “economy”) we’re building.
Prayers to those in Haiti. We hope to help with disaster efforts, if anyone has contacts to birthing centers that are in need of infant warmers, please contact comments@embraceglobal.org
Dear Embrace, I am a Haitian Native living in Florida. I found your information on the internet and was very impressed with your work. I would like to communicate with you regarding the possibility of extending your reach to the Haitian children who are victims of the January 12th earthquake. As a mother, I am deeply impacted by the increasing rate of infant mortality. Just the other day, three babies died within one hour under the same tent serving as a makeshift hospital. While the resources were already scarce in Haiti, the situation has become more dire. I am very impressed with your product and the intuitive technology it uses. I am part of the Haiti Relief Task Force in Broward County Florida and spoke to them about Embrace. They are very excited about the impact it can have on survival for these children. Thank you in advance. Sincerely, Régine
