Blog 2
Week 4
In week, we learnt how we can use ideation tools to generate solutions to the issue that we came up with last week. As promised, my group decided to use a coffee machine instead of the chemical device that can be worn on a cyclist's shirt to signal to surrounding drivers.
This made the literature review and identifying the gaps that we can work on, on our chemical device much easier as coffee makers are more straightforward and are more commonly sold.
To identify and work on gaps that can be found in our chemical device, the coffee maker, we learnt SCAMPER. SCAMPER helps us to brainstorm as many answers as possible to solve our problems whereby we aim to generate a large quantity of ideas over quality ideas.
Here is what my group and I brainstormed during the lesson time:
S (Substitute)
-Substitute coffee capsules with coffee powder.
-Substitute water tank with a milk tank.
C (combine)
-Combine the coffee grinder and machine together.
-Combine the speaker with the coffee machine to play music.
-Combine the coffee maker with your bed so you can make coffee immediately when you wake up.
A (Adapt)
-Use the coffee machine to heat up the water only.
-Use the coffee machine as a thermal flask.
M (Modify)
-Make the coffee maker smaller so that it is more portable.
-Shoot a water jet upwards, towards the coffee powder to brew the coffee.
P (Put to other use)
-Use the coffee machine as a paper weight
-Use the sound of coffee being brewed to make ASMR
-Recycle the used capsules or coffee powder
E (Eliminate)
-Eliminate the use of the cable by using rechargeable batteries instead
-Eliminate the coffee beans
R (Reverse)
-Drink water
As you can see, we took a HUGE advantage of the advice that Dr. Noel gave to us, quantity over quality which made many of our ideas not feasible. However, using SCAMPER let our minds run wild and allowed us to think of much more ideas and to our surprise, some of them ended up in our COWS matrix that I will be mentioning later on.
To sieve out easily the ideas that are feasible, we used the feasibility analysis. To be able to carry out our ideas, we must be able to meet the 4 requirements:
-Budget💰
-Project timeline⏰
-Technical feasibility💻
-Operational feasibility👷
This then allowed us to narrow down our ideas to the following 4:
-Eliminate the use of the cable by using rechargeable batteries instead
-Make the coffee maker smaller so that it is more portable
-Recycle the used coffee capsules
-Put a speaker with the coffee maker to play music
We decided to carry on with our COWS matrix with the first 3 ideas as the last one seemed a bit too difficult for us.
We had little problem with setting up the COWS decision matrix and understanding what it could do as we had already learnt about it back in year 1. The real problem was deciding the criteria. Back in year 1, the criteria was always the same in almost every COWS matrix. Examples are "high tensile strength" or "cost", however, for this module, we had to think differently. This is because now, we are not deciding on the material being used to make an object, instead, we are thinking of how to improve an object to make people want to buy it even more.
Slowly but surely, we managed to complete our COWS decision matrix
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