Start Ideation Phase - #Blog5

This week, we officially entered the Ideation Phase: the stage where you imagine freely and look for creative solutions. The goal wasn’t to find the perfect idea immediately, but to generate as many as possible and let clarity come later.

We started with a challenge: come up with 50 possible solutions in 20 minutes. It sounded almost impossible, but the pressure actually helped us stop overthinking and just flow. We didn’t exactly hit 50, but we definitely generated a ton. Afterward, we sorted everything into three buckets: feasible, surprising, and "not for now" - and that’s when patterns started to appear.

In the next exercise, we combined two unrelated products to see what would happen. Our pair was Netflix and Ninja - a mix of relaxation and intensity. This weird combination opened up new directions and showed us how innovation can come from unexpected places.

But to break the rules effectively, you first need to understand them. That’s why, alongside this creative chaos, we’ve been working hard to ground our project in reality. We held our very first meeting with our research supervisor, Dr. Hadas Harel, to officially kick off the study. Together, we mapped out three critical pillars:1. Definitions: Pinpointing the exact problem we are solving.2. Psychology: Understanding the mechanism of social exclusion and cohesion.3. Technology: Scanning the market to see what tools already exist. This research gave us the confidence to know we aren't just guessing: we're building on facts.

Finally, armed with both data and creativity, we chose one idea to move forward with (after quite a few group arguments…). Our initial concept is a classroom object that acts like a shared "class pet" (inspired by Tamagotchi). It reacts to actions that involve the entire class growing and getting "happier" only when the group acts together.

We mapped out a daily user journey, identified key touchpoints, and understood where our product could actually make an impact.

Week 6 was all about thinking differently: letting go of perfection, combining worlds, and stepping into the mindset of our users. Now we have a solid starting point to begin building

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