A trip to Creativity and back

It was a long process, and the project is finally done. It wasn’t easy, oh no, it wasn’t. This experience let us live the complexities of the generation of insight, ideas and prototypes process as never before, with all their highs and lows. Let see why.

First of all, there was the problem definition, how we will approach it? From the previous days of the semester, the observation phase was ready, we already knew a lot of things so we put it everything written down in a whiteboard and realize that we were completely lost: where to begin? Family travel, group travel, children, retired people, which group should we design for? After doing a big mind map with every group that came into our minds with their main characteristic we arrived nowhere. So then we tried to use the reverse assumption technique, but, again, our destination was nowhere. After that we sat down and begin to chat, looking all the information on board, kind of depressed as we didn’t get anything useful… although I don’t remember when we start talking about crazies travels that people might want to do, like live the II world war, the storming of the Bastille, live like an Amazon Indian or whatever, and we though: “Hey, this isn’t a bad idea after all”. At this stage I remember how many time during classes we heard that the good ideas came after all the obvious one had been exhausted, just like this time.

With that on mind, we draw a big timeline along the board, placed the idea where it belongs and start to think on the other stages of the timeline, using the techniques we feel comfortable, generating a good amount of ideas where we later selected the one we thought would relate better with the initial idea and so we did and the service took form.

But then it came the stage as how we would make the video, and this was the hardest part, because not only we had to agree on the idea, but how we would present it and combine the different views and thing each one considered most important and it was hell. We argue a lot, because, in the end, no one really knew how the video was going to be, there was no global vision of it because we couldn’t agree on that either. After hours of intense debates -  I think we could be on Tolerancia Cero and perform just fine – we agreed on a few points and go home with the mood on the floor.

After that, I talked with my girlfriend and told me all the “ideal” steps that we should follow to make a decent video, and realize that I knew one (screenplay) but never heard of the others, and that this would have save us so much time. I think the teaching team should have given us some guidelines as how to make this video, as I have never opened an edition software neither recorded anything. With all this new information, and also a couple of ideas of how to record the video, I came the next meeting, agreeing much faster and we finally start to move forward with a clear goal in our minds. We still had to discuss of what things to say, in which order, what we’ll show, etc, but it was much easier as now we have a common vision. Nevertheless, it was a slow process, and here I realized how different things can go with the one in our minds, and that one actually must built the prototype, video, or whatever it needs, to see if it really works.

After all the time spent in this project, I can see why the innovation process can be long – and painful – and that in the end no matter how many techniques we use to generate ideas, one must be able to present it in the right way so everyone understands the same thing we thought in the first place.