Now that we had our research question in place and research from online and our own survey, it was time to move onto the ideate stage of the design thinking process. Ideate helps a designer to visually map out their ideas through things like sketches and storyboards so that they can better organize their ideas and take the time to see what fits and what should be reconsidered or discarded. It is best to balance ideas that are both novel and relevant. Relevant ideas can help solutions become realistic but novel ideas are the creativity that can sometimes take ideas above and beyond.
For our ideate day in class, we were not assigned to our partners at first but rather other people within the class. There we came up with both relevant and novel ideas which we shared with our classmates to get their feedback and input on our projects. Then after we went back to our partners and discussed what we were able to come up with on our own and create a list of the best ideas from both of us. Some of our relevant ideas were to have a speaker event for cyberbullying, create a support group for those affected by cyberbullying, and to have posters/flyers spreading awareness of cyberbullying. Some of our novel ideas were to have an elephant step on the phones of cyberbullies, ban Wi-Fi privileges of people caught cyberbullying, and having cyberbullies attend mandatory anti-bullying classes. We looked for ways to combine multiple ideas into one and knew that what we came up with should be able to not only show real examples of cyberbullying but also be an ongoing solution that can adapt to multiple situations. What we were able to come up with in the end was “Cyberbullying: Awareness on Wheels.”
