Week 9 – Featuring

Welcome to Week 9! We will be exploring how product creation and development takes place in the real world and observe lessons from some of the most successful industry practices.

Our Projects

Teams and links to team documents

Research – the importance of learning about the topic and context for the project.

Moving from an idea to a project concept is a very important phase in any product development, and as we start thinking of more concrete ideas that lead to our project design, it is essential that we find out as much as we can about the topic and related initiatives.
Our first task is to explore each of the following items to prepare to advance our project design:

• Background information
• Other similar initiatives
• Initiatives we can learn from that may not be in the same field but are inspirational.
  For a more in depth description of each of these three, please visit our prompts for Week 8.

Towards the end of your team documents, you will find a table where you will include at least three sites for each of the categories above. Make sure that these are valid and reliable sites, and if you have any doubt as to how to ascertain that they are trustworthy please let us know.

First Design

After you complete your research, it is time to engage in the first project design. Please remember that we will arrive at a detailed concept for the project, so that at the end of the process you will be able to develop and implement it if you so choose.

This first design is simply a more complete description of what your project will do, what it will attempt to accomplish, its objectives and intended audience.

To help facilitate your design process, please address the following items:

• Target audience/clients. Who is the project intended for? Whose needs does it serve?
• Objectives. What does the project try to accomplish? What needs does the project try to satisfy?
• Value proposition. Why are you doing the project? How is the project a unique contribution to the field? Why is this project different from others that already exist?
• Detailed description. Write a detailed description of what your project will do, what it will look like, what the product or service will be.

Pixar: the Creativity Masters

Pixar has produced some of the most successful animated films. As a company, it is admired and viewed as an example of innovation and creativity. As expressed by Pixar’s leaders, one of the secrets to their continued success is the brain trust, an important part of their production method involving review and critique.

Please watch the following video in which this process is described.

Please discuss below.

How can you relate this brain trust with your own experience in teamwork? From what you know about the workplace, is this a common practice? What risks are there in doing things this way?

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