With our challenge statement ready to go, it was time to start diverging on ideas for solutions. We began ideating with a brainwalking session where we had 6 different questions addressing the themes in our challenge statement (relationships, collaboration, and networking) in different ways.
In our brainstorming session, we hoped to get an even wider variety of ideas. We recruited a group of participants who have all had experience with collaboration, some with music experience and some without.
There were 7 participants total. The group consisted of 2 graduate visual communication design students; 1 visual artist; 2 musicians who we involved previously, Owen and Eli; and 2 people from our design team.
That same day, we took the combined system and turned it into a tally wall, which was essentially a poll about which ideas might be the most useful to musicians. The tally wall was placed in the Murphy Arts Building on the first Friday of the month when galleries have openings.
We knew there would be a variety of people that we could get feedback from, including musicians because we set it up outside of a Joyful Noise’s performance space and recruited passers-by.
We found that there was interest in all of the ideas and that we didn’t need to converge more on them yet.
We decided to take our organization idea back to the Joyful Noise office because their staff is a combination of musicians and industry professionals. We thought they might know a lot of people in the Indianapolis scene who could be stakeholders in our organization.
We made some changes to our organization card deck and then hung our system on the wall.
How might we start generating
solution ideas for our challenge statement?
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How might we utilize diverse perspectives to diverge further on the broader ideas from our previous method?
With so many great ideas generated from our previous ideation methods, it was time to start converging.
How might we converge on generated ideas
in order to create a cohesive system?
As a team, we picked out the ideas that were engaged with most in our sessions and that best addressed our challenge statement. With all of the ideas in front of us, we realized that many of them had the potential to be organized into a system.
We brought those ideas back to musicians so they could identify which ones they liked best and if they saw a way for them to work as a system. We conducted the session with 2 musicians, Diop and Sphie, and had 2 design team members individually help them develop their systems.
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The ideas generated in this session guided us in creating prompts for our next session, brainstorming.
7
9
How might we determine who would be involved with the different components of the musician organization?
With the basic concept of our organization together, the next step was to determine who could be involved and who the stakeholders are.
There were 4 participants from the design team and 2 musicians, Diop and Sean. We hoped that, with the structure of this session, participants could build off of each other’s ideas. In our debrief discussion, Diop and Sean elaborated further on ideas that stood out most to them.
In the next phase of our project, we worked with participants to generate solution ideas.
1.
2.
Synthesis
The design team later identified the main ideas from each question and categorized them as events, products, or services.
These were a few of the most frequently mentioned or developed ideas:
An open mic event with live streaming
Question 1
1.
Project
update
warm up
session
2.
brainwalking
Question 1
Question 1
Question 1
Question 1
Question 1
one minute per sheet / 6 sheets per question round
Break between questions 3 and 4
4.
Debrief
discussion
3.
-
If you wanted to collaborate with your favorite artist, how would you go about connecting with them?
-
If local musicians were one big family, how would you find and adopt new members?
-
If you wanted to discover a new, unknown artist to mentor/bring to light, how would you find them?
-
If Google created something that could help you collaborate, what would it be?
-
If you were able to erase social media as we know it now and come up with something new and creative, what features would your “new” social media contain?
-
In 50-100 years what would a local musician use to find other local musicians to collaborate on a project?
A central space for musicians to connect with each other
A central space for musician information
A service to help musicians make themselves stand out
These were our 3 prompts and examples of ideas that were generated:
1.
Introduction of ourselves & participants
2.
Project
background
5 minute individual ideation
3.
then for 3 different prompts
4.
Open group discussion
Session feedback
5.
Music organization
Musician speakeasy
1.
Create a new way for local musicians to get information and connect with each other.
Pay it forward street team
Guerilla marketing
2.
Create a new way to make yourself stand
out to people you want to work with.
Safe practice space
Mentor program
3.
Create a new way to encourage more
local musicians to perform.
In order to clearly express all of the ideas while allowing them to be movable, we turned the ideas into a deck of cards.
During our discussion, we all realized that a musician organization is necessary to make all of the other ideas work as a system. This was our main “A-ha!” moment and our participants were very enthusiastic about the concept they created.
After the session, the design team worked together to create a combination of Diop’s and Sphie’s systems because, although they were similar, they organized them differently.
project
overview
Ask participants
who would be involved
Take note and
stick it on the wall
1.
project overview
2.
session instructions
The cards were presented to the participants and they partnered up with their facilitators
Diop and Sphie picked one card from each category to make a simple system.
round
one
3.
4.
5 minute
discussion
Diop and Sphie picked additional cards to make a more complex system.
round
two
5.
6.
10 minute discussion
7.
debrief &
feedback
The Joyful Noise and Asthmatic Kitty staff shared specific names and general roles of people who might fit in with the needs of the organization. We hoped that, by identifying the people involved, it might help us see the potential structure differently. This didn’t quite happen, but it did help us develop a better idea of who the stakeholders are.
3.
4.
discuss
The key finding from this method:
Our solution is a musician organization.
