Activity 4
Convergent Thinking
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For this activity, we focused on evaluating and prioritizing certain ideas we came up with during the previous activity, using our own structured criteria. The goal of this was to help us narrow our ideas down, and focus moreso on one, to show and improve our convergent thinking skills. The first step was to establish what the criteria would be, considering aspects such as feasibility, originality, impact, and cost, to guide our decision-making.
Next, we practiced convergent thinking to refine our ideas using different methods which we learned about in class:
We ended up using a decision matrix chart to evaluate our ideas based on cost-effectiveness and effort required. The chart consisted of two sides, one being impact/cost, and the other being effort. This helped us narrow things down to a category of ideal or nearly ideal solutions. We went through each idea, completely discarding some of the weaker ones while also merging similar ideas to create stronger, more refined options. Once we had a solid selection, we listed our best ideas from the matrix and voted on the one we thought was the most effective.
This process helped us focus our ideas into a few better ones, but looking back, I think we could improve by prioritizing feasibility earlier in the discussion. Some ideas were clearly unrealistic, yet we spent time considering them, which distracted us from the HMW question and problem at hand. In the future, being more mindful of practicality could make the process more efficient and keep us focused on viable solutions.
