Return to University 20-21

Idea Generation Week 1

I started idea generation by doing some brainstorms reacting to different questions. The questions were:

What makes me cry?

What makes me angry?

What makes me excited?

What makes me laugh?

What stimulates me intellectually?

What interests me?

I chose to brainstorm as I am somebody that needs a visual way of trying to get my notes down in the beginning. Listing them all straight away would have made me feel overwhelmed and I probably would have started getting a bit confused. Please see the gallery below for the brainstorms and I will also list them below that.

What makes me cry?

  • Ignorance
  • Homelessness
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Injustice
  • Pain
  • Loneliness
  • Death
  • Poverty
  • Stress
  • Petty Crime
  • Existential Crisis

What makes me angry?

  • Indifference
  • Poverty
  • Injustice
  • Greed
  • Racism
  • Restriction to education
  • Sexism
  • Unsolicited Advice
  • Ignorance
  • Lying
  • Scammers
  • Hypocrisy
  • Homelessness
  • Starvation
  • War
  • Brexit
  • Money being hoarded
  • Violence
  • History Denial
  • Denial

What makes me excited?

  • Buying gifts
  • Seasonal decoration
  • Learning new things
  • Different cultures
  • Music
  • Trying new food
  • Technology advancements
  • Medical breakthroughs
  • SpaceX launches
  • Unusual ingredients
  • New recipes
  • Languages
  • Seeing family
  • My nephews
  • Autumn-Winter season

What makes me laugh?

  • Anxiety
  • Sudden bad news
  • Witty humour
  • Babies laughing
  • Jump scares
  • Being scared
  • Melissa McCarthy
  • Sarah Millican
  • The good place
  • SNL (Saturday Night Live)
  • Betty White
  • Funny coincidences
  • Unexpected things

What do I find intellectually stimulating?

  • People
  • Physics
  • History
  • Biology
  • Technology
  • Behaviour
  • Textiles
  • Entomology
  • Hand crafts
  • Cultural differences
  • Architecture
  • Mental health
  • Learning differences
  • Other points of view
  • Processes
  • Procedures
  • Chemistry

What interests me?

  • Card making
  • Interior design
  • Sandbox games
  • Knitting
  • Crochet
  • Drawing
  • Sculpting
  • Embroidery
  • Playing the keyboard
  • Cooking
  • 3D modelling
  • Other languages
  • Debates
  • Horror games
  • VR
  • Horror movies
  • Paranormal
  • Tabletop roleplay
  • Drag queens
  • Gay culture
  • Design
  • Card making

The next step after identifying these seeds was too break them down into good starting points and bad starting points. I asked myself a few questions to help me decide.

How much research can I do on the subject?

What is interesting about the subject?

Will I become bored of this subject?

Is the subject currently relative?

I instantly was able to rule out a lot of them just by googling them alone and seeing that there wasn’t a great deal of information about them. I also combined a few of the ideas and abstracted from them a little. I was left with.

  • Learning Differences
  • Hunger
  • Homelessness
  • Poverty
  • LGBT culture
  • Entomology
  • Assistive technology
  • Restriction to education
  • Architecture
  • Anxiety
  • Technological breakthrough
  • VR
  • Textiles
  • Ecosystems
  • Horror and the paranormal

I then decided to try to group these even further and see if there was a way to combine several ideas into one. The most obvious one to initially combine was ecosystems and entomology until I was left with life and the balance of ecosystems. I also combined the ideas involving people into health and health education. I was finally left with four avenues of research to explore in my second week.

  • Health and health education
  • Created by hand
  • Life- Ecosystems and balance
  • Parapsychology

My next step is to take these through to the second week and begin researching them individually to see how interesting they truly are.