2.8. Exercise: Project Ideation

Objective: generate a brainstorm list of project ideas.

This ideation exercise is intended to generate and share an abundance of potential project ideas related to physical computing and the Course Project: Making Things Magic. As a warmup, you wish to refer to Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh Exhibit Design for ideas on the museum approach, or the general body of Related Work.

1. Please consider all the themes we might explore through physical computing: human needs for expression, communication, learning, life support, and delight; the embodiment of computation, measurement, time, signals, and algorithm; and the nature of processes which flow from physical to digital forms and back.
2. Come up with fifty ideas for projects which address the themes above. When devising ideas, consider holding back your presumptions about what is or is not possible technically: at this stage we encourage broad, unbounded thinking.
3. Bring your ideas to class on a physical printout following these rules:
   • all ideas on a single 8.5” x 11” piece of paper
   • one line per idea
   • number the lines
   • leave a 2-inch margin on the left hand side

The physical format is very important as we will be passing around and reviewing idea lists in class.

Some general heuristics for brainstorming success can be found in the Ideation and Brainstorming resource section.