“Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.” – Malcolm Gladwell

In keeping with our fun little puns, we’ve continued with the rain theme (or moved on to a wine theme, whichever floats your boat), and our brainstorm downpour has finally come to a slow drizzle. It’s now time to take all the ideas we’ve come up with, even all the new ones since returning from IdeaSquare, and see how they measure up against our project values.

With all our ideas, we implemented a team voting system that included factors weighted by importance. This allowed us to make decisions based on critical components of what we wanted to achieve with our ideas rather than just personal preference. By giving a more detailed breakdown of the voting, the ideas we presented and took a little further were the most suited for the project and our aligned goals.

At CERN, we presented all our ideas in each session, resulting in valuable and rapid feedback from colleagues. Our final presentation at IdeaSquare gave a more in-depth look at our idea and concepts for the Hyger Fire Drone and Hyger Glasses. Though this gave us critical feedback that carried over when we returned to our local area, we would ultimately find the Hyger Fire Drone was a solution that did not meet our innovation goal standards. Our continuation of research and idea development back at DFM after IdeasQuare would bring up concepts in opportunity areas of animal road hazards and women’s health, two areas to which we did not get a lot of time to dedicate while we were at CERN.

Our auditing process here collated ratings from 1-5 from each team member for several points of criteria, totally both with and without technology application, to see the ideas’ innovation and societal impact potential. In the end, from four opportunity areas–bushfires and water/air pollution, native animals and road hazards, delayed diagnosis in women’s health, and wellness and visual impairment–we were able to decide to continue with ideation and research the latter two of these.

Our key factors looked at how technology may or may not be applied, from both CERN and ATTRACT, as well as the societal impact, future thinking opportunity and ideation potential. Delayed diagnosis in women’s health, and wellness and visual impairment proved the richest in the potential for the goals of this project, and we continue with finite research to better grasp how specific ideation would apply.

Idea Audit Update

Of our two opportunity areas and main ideas for each–MediScan and Hyger Glasses–one final take of voting as a team took place. The criteria placed on the research areas and their ideas differed in one area, looking more at the positive impact rather than the overall. Though the numbers were close, looking into the women’s health problem and the MediScan concept inched ahead due to the team thinking it would have a better long-term positive effect on society in a 2030-future.

Our proposed direction is documented in our following post.

Team Snapshot

The team has been have copious amounts of meetings leading up to the end of the semester, and we think it’s time to take a break but we need to persevere and keep moving forward. It’s times like this where we appreciate the little things, like the fact that we can fall into roles and complete tasks as we know that they need to be done.

Other highlights:

• Nildene really enjoyed creating the voting document; she’s EXCEL-lent at spreadsheets.

Quote of the Week:

Next Steps

• Refine research and further establish our chosen idea
• Prepare our Phase 1 presentation
• Support each other not to be stressed or nervous about our Phase 1 presentation
• Miss being in Geneva
• Have a good holiday break and New Year!