Week 1: Finding Our Concept

Today, we had our brainstorming session to find a concept for the city of Enschede. This task was more than challenging, because we only had one day to come up with a good concept.

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Divergence

In the first lesson, we met our brainstorming and scrum teacher Yvens. With him, we were supposed to to the divergence part - collecting as many ideas as possible. Yvens first asked us which ideas we already had, which resulted in a few ideas being written down on a concept. The main ideas revolved around:

• The hidden gems of Enschede in combination with Google maps

• Fashion: An interactive dress or an interactive virtual mirror

• Mission Impossible: A treasure hunt in Enschede

• A game (the sort of which we still needed to decide on)

• Weed

Yvens also suggested that we should think about a restaurant finder depending on which ingredients someone was able to eat. As a team, we were not too enthusiastic about this idea, but he really liked it. Under Yvens' guidance, we already started converging, but we did not feel enthusiastic about any of the concepts yet.

This is what we came up with in the session with Yvens:

After the first lesson, we decided as a team that we needed more ideas, because the next lesson was already going to be the convergence session. Therefore, we sat down on a table and thought of additional, new ideas during our lunch break. Among these, we already made a selection of the concepts we would evaluate in more detail.

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Convergence

With Herman Paassen, we entered the divergence stage. He was not very happy about our concepts because we had not really elaborated on a story for any of these. Also, Herman criticised that we had already started converging in the first session, although this had been Yven's suggestion. Now we felt a bit lost.

Herman suggested to us that we should first determine the goal of the campaign. This was a great idea, since it allowed us to set the goal as "Make people stay longer in Enschede and spend money". Sadly, we had to eliminate our idea "Dance with Enschede", since it did not serve the goal. Mission Impossible seemed a suitable concept to reach the goal, but the opinions in the team were divided. I had suggested this idea initially but I was not super happy about it, because I personally would not spend a lot of time on a game if I was a by-passer. I'd want it to be quick and take place at the location of the installation. I also saw a problem with the coupons we picked as rewards for completing the "mission" because then we really need a sponsor with the willingness to invest a lot.

In the end, we realised that we all like the idea of letters in Enschede, inspired by #iamsterdam and the letters "TWENTE" at the university of Twente and did not want to abandon it. It was very confusing for me that Herman suddenly liked this idea too, because I'd had the impression that it was not enough to reach our goal. But he said, instead of making people stay in Enschede, it would promote Enschede (e.g. via social media) and attract new visitors.

So we picked this idea eventually - with the difference that our letters will be interactive, allowing visitors to design the pattern displayed on them. Everyone on the team was excited about this idea. It is justifiable: The letters in Amsterdam were so popular that they had to be taken down. Now we have a concept and a (changeable) team name: The Letter Team!

This is our COCD box of all the ideas we took into the convergence phase: