What is an interesting application for the Nokia 3650 that makes use of both its photo capture and communication capabilities?
We followed the process suggested in the "Guidelines for brainstorming" provided with the assignment. As our problem statement shows, we didn't include "useful to a group of SIMS students" as one of our original constraints.
We narrowed down our large list of ideas by first briefly discussing each item and then dicussing more generally what we were interested in creating and why. Next we all voted by walking up to the white board and initialing the ideas that we wanted to be considered further. We chose this method because we felt that this was the best way for everyone to have their honest say without having to denigrate other ideas. The top five vote-getters were selected for further consideration. Anyone who strongly felt that an idea should be pushed through had a chance to make their case, so we ended up with six finalists.
We then brainstormed criteria for our final decision, picked the top 6 criteria, and created a table showing the ideas on one side and the criteria on the other. We then scored each idea using the criteria, thus filling in the table. By totaling the table rows we were able make our final decision.
The following ideas were interesting, but we decided that they didn't merit serious consideration, for the noted reasons.
| Photo Album | many of these in existence already |
| Are you hot? | doesn't really need a real time camera |
| Game: Spot the terrorist | ummm, big potential for this to be evil |
| Trading baseball cards. Collecting action shots of athletes. | camera phone wouldn't take high quality shots |
| Amateur photo contest. | wouldn't necessitate a phone or real time, most amateurs have more sophisticated camera equipment |
| Mobile American Idol | would have to work with a major network to get this to work |
| Dating Services | too many out there -- no need for real time |
| Cataloguing tool for... plants, animals, etc. | interesting, but you would use a higher quality camera |
| Scientific catalog for research | would probably use a more sophisticated device than a phone |
| Collage maker | not sure if people would really want these collages |
| Penpal | other devices could be used for this |
| Medical emergency, paramedics to send pics to doctors | paramedics would use a more sophisticated device, don't know if phone images would be helpful enough for docs to make a diagnosis |
| Repair people might use it to send pics of wiring to experts | don't know enough about whether there is a need for this |
| Public transport times | impossible for us to do in one semester, doesn't necessitate the phone |
| Pop ups on the phones when you walk by store | we wouldn't really want this |
| Mobile messaging with pictures | phones already do this |
| Affair cover up software | we don't completely comprehend what affair cover up entails |
| Affair detection | not sure how a phone would be used in this |
| Hipster bingo, burning man bingo | similar to a scavenger hunt, but bingo instead of a list |
| Sims online create your own car/person/bike -- put ordinary real world item into your game | would be difficult to do this with the SIMS online company, also, doesn't necessitate a camera phone |
| Do I sue or not? Online car estimates | would people actually think to use this when they are in a time of crisis? |
| Some "leveling game" like taking photos of people wearing gap jeans on the street, if you get enough, you win a pair, and go onto the next level | boring, need a better idea for a leveling game |
| Party cam -- Personal camera to show what is going on at a bar on a given night | don't know how well the camera would work in dark bars, could be done better with a standard webcam |
| Reality show that is following someone around for a night going out and party that people could watch online | interesting idea because the camera is so subtle, this isn't really an "application" idea |
| 1: Translation | 2: Travel | 3: Fans | 4: Wishlists | 5: Indymedia | 6: Scavenger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A: group appeal | 5 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| B: excitement | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
| C: simplicity | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| D: visual | 2 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 |
| E: realtime | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| F: easy | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| total | 20 | 20 | 22 | 28 | 23 | 23 |
The scoring results above led us to select the wishlist application as our idea.