POST 9 // Visual Documentation of the Brainstorming Session
By Eugenie Park
Brainstorming with my group has always been a fun and insightful activity. I find that these collaborative brainstorming sessions are valuable as they provide me with new perspective and new ideas. As a group, we all agreed that it was easier and more interesting to help each other out on their issues than focus on our own. For some reason, I was unable to think of design concepts or ideas but with others I had no problem. I think this was why these sessions are so important and helpful. Since we had spent the whole semester together, it was easier to talk and express ideas with each other and the discussion we had were valuable stepping stones to where we all stand with our focus ideas.
The brainstorming sessions in class started off a little slow as we didn’t know where or how to start. We thought it would be good to separate our possible design outcomes under the different branches of Emergent Design; Service Design, Generative Design and Data Visualisation. However, we found that this was limiting our ideas and was keeping us trapped as we tried think of outcomes that embodied the traits of those design categories. So we began to generate ideas first and then refine them to fit into emergent design. We disregarded how realistic or attainable these design outcomes were and instead focused on the problem statement and thought of all the possible solutions. This definitely helped us to create lots more ideas and concepts.
The following photos are from other group members. Thinking of ideas for each member of the group was helpful for us all as it put in the right mind set to generate ideas.
The above image shows the ideas that we came up with for my specific focus. I was really interested about the notion of Post Secret; an ongoing community mail art project where people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Most of the concepts were based on education, support and anonymity. Brainstorming was very insightful as I definitely would not have been able to come up with all of these ideas by myself. I’m happy with the session that we had as I feel as if I have something to build upon with my design proposal. Discussing my ideas and thoughts with each member of the group has been beneficial as they have given me critical feedback on where I am with my focus as well as creating questions that I can further research.
Tucker, A. 1942, “Psycho, Heidelberg Military Hospital”, Australian War Memorial, viewed 14 September 2016 <https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART28305/>
Emergent Practices 
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