Ideation and Idea Selection
My brain is storming and I have no umbrella
Welcome back to BLOG #2 of my Chemical Product Design Journey. This time I'll kick it off by diving straight into my group's brainstorming session.
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry we have chosen to tackle Goal 6 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, clean water and sanitation as such we decided that our chemical product's general goal is to be able to provide clean and drinkable water for a wide variety of uses.
We started off brainstorming by thinking of the chemical processes that are involved in the production of clean and consumable water in a typical setting and worked our way from there. To facilitate and encourage thinking outside of the box, we decided for our brainstorming session that we would not abide by any ground rules aside from the fact that everyone must contribute at least 5 ideas and allow any idea no matter how outrageous or impractical
Above is the culmination of our efforts, the brainchild of 5 of the brightest chemical engineering students, impressive I know. My favourite ideas were the completely outrageous ones like "Google Assistant smart water filter" and "Water filter with built-in music soundbar" Jokes aside I think the brainstorming session was pretty fruitful and I had a blast doing it, someone would come up with some unhinged completely unrealistic idea and we would build on it and change a few things with the help of one another and suddenly the idea would not seem so unrealistic anymore. Watching and hearing my teammates come up with things that I would have never even thought of was eye-opening and I've grown to appreciate getting input and feedback from other perspectives even more.
To be feasible, or not to be feasible, that is the question
Now that we have come up with 25 "incredibly quality" ideas. How do we best decide which ideas are of a better quality than the other?
We objectively ran our ideas through something I like to call the feasibility machine. We considered four of the following factors to decide whether an idea is feasible or not:
Time
Is one semester enough time to bring the idea to life and within a reasonable standard of quality
Budget
Do we have enough money to purchase the parts?
Have we considered prototyping costs?
Unexpected costs (If parts arrive broken or are not working as intended)?
Technical
Does our lab have enough facilities and resources such as utilities to facilitate the testing and fabrication of the final device?
Do we even have the technical skills and know-how to assemble it?
Do we have enough space to make it?
Operational
Do we have enough people to carry out the testing and fabrication of the project?
Is it safe and legal?
To consider the project's feasibility we asked binary questions with the factors in mind. For an idea to be completely feasible, it must answer yes to all of the binary questions. A single no means that the idea is off the table.
The process was rather simple considering that we were simply answering yes or no questions. It was also surprisingly painful when we ran some of our more favoured ideas through the feasibility machine, we discovered the wilder and more fun ideas were probably too unfeasible to do and had to be shot down. Having gone through this process with all 25 of our ideas we had narrowed it down to 3 ideas that were feasible and that we were happy with and interested in doing
The Matrix 2: Engineering Decisions
Have you ever had a tough time making a decision? Don't know what economy rice toppings you want to pick, what colour iPhone to buy or which elective to choose for your next semester.
The Engineering Decision Matrix is the tool for you!
Though I'm sure we've all done some version of this when making decisions, trying to weigh the disadvantages and advantages of a choice but having a rough time because it is all weighed using vague factors that we never really fully quantify. The Engineering Decision Matrix makes the process a much more quantified way of weighing decisions and thus will ensure that your decisions are made much more objectively.
The process is relatively simple and easy to remember using the mnemonic COWS
Criteria
Come up with at least 5 evaluation criteria that fit within the context of your decision
Options
These are the choices that have been determined to be feasible. In our case, it would be the 3 ideas that we got from our feasibility machine
Weighting
Assign a weightage to each criterion based on how critical they are. Make sure these weights add up to 100%
Score
Use a rating scale that could be from 1 to 3, 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. 1 always being the poorest and the upper limit the best
Score each option against the criterion and calculate the final score
The option with the highest score is therefore the objectively best decision based on your criterion
In our matrix, we came up with the criteria by keeping both merits and demerits of both ideas in mind as well as the desired outcome and our skills and capabilities so that all possible considerations are tackled in our assessment. It was pretty simple to do so once we had all this in mind, the trouble came when we decided on the weightage.
How do we then decide what criteria is more important than another? In our case, we decided on the criteria weightage based on the long-term goal considering that we hope to build this idea for the first time without any prior experience and that the ultimate goal of our project is to make something that will contribute in some capacity UN SDG that we have decided (GOAL 6, CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION). We put the highest weightage on the Complexity of Construction and followed suit with its "Greenness" and Sustainability alongside its Effectiveness as those are the criteria that are most important in the long term of the project. Below is our own Decision Matrix to better Illustrate how COWS is applied
The Rainwater harvesting with pH sensor and filter idea got the highest weighted score and this score is a direct consequence of our own group's criteria and weightage it was pretty clear and everyone agreed that it is the idea that we hopefully will bring to life.
With that, we have come to the end of BLOG #2. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read it, I felt that this entry was rather abstract and may end up boring some of you. But fret not, in my experience boring stuff always comes before more exciting things so stay tuned!
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