Welcome to the Electric Eye team blog post for the week of October 4th! This week the team let ideas flow as we finish up our process of concept generation. Our discussion is centered around finding the best fit design for our customers, though we’ve allowed ourselves to leave that box a bit this week with some help from a guest speaker from this weeks lecture!

Generating The Right Idea

This week we had guest speaker Dr. Elif Akçalı discuss “Divergent Thinking” along with a workshop that had our team brainstorming in new ways. As Engineers, we often suppress our creativity in favor of the quick or easy solution rather then allowing ourselves to generate ideas! In our workshop, Dr. Akçalı emphasized to us the importance of generating ideas for the sake of generating ideas; we were given helpful exercises that expanded our range of thought and led us to some interesting, difficult and improbable, yet unique concepts. While much of what we came up with will quickly be moved to the side, there were ideas that are worth considering or that pushed the team into new spaces. An important thing to keep in mind through much of our concept generation will be choosing the concept that we are going to develop! Its easy to look at some of our ideas that involve cool technology to make our device, but often times the RIGHT idea is not the BEST idea. With that in mind, the team will continue working hard to make the best project! (Below is a white-board from one a recent brainstorming session!)

The Electric Eye team is working on building out our System’s Architecture, which is bringing much of our research and concept generation together! We don’t have too much longer until we present our Preliminary Design Review, we’ll continue polishing our design and refining our concept. Thanks for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!