The Seattle Think Tank is a society of technology enthusiast and innovators. Its purpose is to create systems and inventions for fun and profit. This group was established so that ideas could be vetted by constructive criticism. We meet regularly to discuss ideas and to plan out projects.

Archive for the ‘Weekly Online Brainstorm’ Category

Weekly Online Brainstorm Retrospection

For the last couple of months we have been experimenting with Weekly Online Brainstorms.  The purpose was to give us a way to practice coming up with ideas in more accessible way than meeting together in person.  After doing this for a several times I asked for feedback.  I got plenty of nice comments.  I certainly appreciate those and they inspire me to keep finding better ways to do this but, I am more interested in the criticism.
I boiled it down to the following comments.  I think these are very good and actually give a good profile for where this process is weak.  It really breaks into two groups of comments.  The choices in the process itself and then how to improve the process to allow for more input. Comments regarding the process.
  1. Doesn’t always have to start on Monday.
  2. Once a week is a bit tough, because some weeks are very full.
  3. maybe let each one run its course, pause a few days, and start another one
  4. I don’t think they are as effective as face to face.
  5. put more constraints on the topics. IE, instead of ” What do you make of kinect”, do something more focused. That would lead to more actionable ideas.
  6. I think there are ways to do this that is better than email.
The general sentiment is that the choice email probably isn’t the best.  I would tend to agree with this.  But, it is the most approachable way and it is pretty easy to setup a filter or ignore it if it is too busy.  More complex solutions tend to loose people quickly except if they are willing to learn the new medium. With the timing of these, I have noticed that once a conversation has made it to Friday, it rarely leaps the weekend and restarts the next week.  I think its just something about the human mind and how we naturally work in cycles.  I do like fitting a weekend in there though.  Many people save up more social emails like these until the weekend when they can put some real thought into it. What I found really interesting was request to do this in a more collaborative way.
  1. I prefer to provide feedback when I have valuable feedback to provide. I may noodle something for a few weeks, or have a flash of brilliance, and would like to have a place I can go and put my feedback then.
  2. I wonder about how to place this process into the ecosystem/continuum, in  a way that it leads to changes and new products and new jobs etc….
  3. What we need is a hierarchical Discussion Group. So things can break into related topics, and they are persistent.
  4. I would rather be doing this in a co-editing space of some kind
  5. I wonder if there is room for more deliberation on the back end to help the refactoring.
  6. I think that there is an opportunity to actually take some of these further
These were really interesting and I wonder if a product could be designed for it.  If nothing else, just using a google doc might work. But, this leads me back to the problem of adoption.  It is possible to do this, but, is this a good idea?  On one hand people can add to it and refactor as we go.  On the other hand some people do better to just send email into a list in a more conversational way. So from all of this feedback I think I’m going to make a couple changes.
  1. I am going to start this on Wednesday, right in the middle of the week when people need some distraction.
  2. If the conversation still seems active the next week, I will just let it ride.  I don’t think this will be the case but, we will see.
  3. After posing the topic, I will wait until the weekend and then dump the information into a google doc to share with others.  It becomes a sort of brainstorming wipe board.  If anyone wants to brainstorm and refactor with me, they are certainly welcome to.
  4. For face-to-face discussions folks will just have to wait until idea nights.  Although I am somewhat interested in doing some sort of breakfast but, I think I would loose too many people who are busy with morning work.  Maybe I will try that some other day.
I do want to point out that many of the ideas have been put into trydea.com so they can be grown there.  I haven’t been promoting it much because we are still working on it.  But, I think it will help to allow groups to vet ideas and to form groups. That should do it for now.  We will do more another retrospection in a couple months.
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Posted by paulin to Weekly Online Brainstorm, retrospection on July 5, 2011 at 9:49 pm

Co-working spaces

Around Seattle we have Co-working Spaces.  These are large spaces that have been divided up so individuals and small companies can rent desks by the day or month and have somewhere to work other than their house.  Its an interesting phenomenon and I have a feeling it will grow tremendously across the country as people choose not to drive everywhere and to work more independently. Clearly there are problems with having a group of strangers use the same space to work.  Everyone has different working habit, noise requirements, and space requirements.  And then there are all the “human” problems that need to be addressed.  It certainly is a tricky business to put together. Last week the Seattle Think Tank’s  “Weekly Online Brainstorm” question was “What are the problems with co-working, and what are innovations that can make it more widely adopted?”  The following are some ideas we came up with. Ideas
  1. Meeting Room Tablet Reservation system : Imagine an iPad duct taped to the door of a meeting room.  It has a google calendar on it of everyone who has reserved the room. You can easily see who is in there and who has it reserved.  If you want the room there is some touch screeny way of doing this.  If you don’t want to get up, you can just do it through google calendar.
  2. Heavy and Light Room Configuration : Divide a space into two distinct areas for co-working: a Heavy work area, and a Light chill area. The Work area is like a library, and it is where you do the “heavy lifting” work. Quiet, chill, and all the assets of having an office. The Lightweight area has bean bags, couches, etc, is reconfigurable, is probably open to the kitchen, etc. This is where you sit with your laptop and do all the “lightweight” work that doesn’t require a quiet deep-focus area.
  3. How To Start A Co-Working Space : A book explaining the ins and outs of creating a co-working space.  It would also have techniques for dealing with common and difficult problems.
  4. Mall Incubator : With the death of the mall you might be able to use it as a co-working space. Malls have a lot of space available, plenty of parking, food and grocery stores, and if you have a space on the outside wall of the mall, 24×7 access.
  5. Co-working Membership Card : Create a federation of co-working spaces with a universal membership card.  This would allow someone to one person at one place and then have office hours for someone else at another.  Something like a subscription coffee shop.
  6. Co-working Skills Network : it would be nice to have a easy connection to the different people and skills from within a co-working space.  This network would let you know what other people at your space are working on, what they are looking for, what they can provide, and their availability.
  7. Quite Booths : Remember the desk with walls you had in grade school?  Having some of those around would be handy. When you need to focus.
  8. Self Cleaning Fridge : It’s a fridge with a countdown timer on it.  On Friday at 4 pm the countdown will hit zero.  Then all the shelves tip forward and dump everything in the fridge into the trash; recycling, whatever… It then self cleans and the timer resets for next week.
This actually ended up being a very difficult subject to form ideas from.  For the most part they were about how we could change rules or specific changes that could be made to co-working spaces that are available. I do feel very strongly about this as an alternative form of working.  I suspect that there are several possibilities for changing how people work, commute, and interact with each other.  I also feel that with the pressures of fuel and quality workers many people want to shift in this direction. At a minimum it makes a nice alternative between working from home or a centralized office.  There certainly are opportunities here.
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Posted by paulin to Seattle 2.0, Weekly Online Brainstorm on June 28, 2011 at 6:12 am

Opportunies with the XBox Kinect

You probably already know about XBox Kinect. “Kinect for Xbox 360 is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.” What you might not know is that the Kinect has a very special camera built into it for capturing 3d scene information and a multi-array microphone to capture where sound is coming from.  Because of this, the DIY community latched onto the Kinect and has been reusing the technology to make some very interesting projects.  For instance, here you can see a better way to display earthquake data.   And here are 5 hacks that people have done to the Kinect.  What is great is that Microsoft has even released an SDK to make it that much easier to create applications from the Kinect. Last week the Seattle Think Tank’s  “Weekly Online Brainstorm” was targeted at this technology. We explored what else could be done with the Kinect. We did end up with over 50 ideas but, I have pared them down to 12.

Ideas

  1. Senior Health Monitoring : Use the XBox Kinect to measure the flexibility, stability of seniors in a elderly health care facility.
  2. Secret Dance Door : Build the Kinect camera into a front door.  It now can recognize a set of gestures to unlock the door.  No more keys and it knows who is outside.
  3. Virtual Kanban Board :  Add a digital projector and convert a wall into a very large Kanban board.  The information could be captured and stored for an agile team.
  4. Object copier : Use the Kinect camera to take a snap shot of a shape and then use a 3d printer to make the shape.
  5. Virtual Water Cooler : People could gather and talk in a virtual hallway, you could walk to a door and see the office of different people, even though they were virtual.  This would be more for people who are working remotely or at home.
  6. Virtual Walk Input Device : Add to a Tread Desk, to facilitate a multiple screen work space while walking.  The Kinect can detect your movement forward and backwards which would move windows and perhaps scroll up and down a page when you walk.
  7. 3D House Mapping Bot : Use a robot to map the inside of a house in 3D.  This could help home shoppers to get a more complete virtual tour of a house before visiting it.
  8. Gesture Pictures : Build gesture capture into a digital camera so you don’t have to ask someone else to take a picture of you and your friends. Just gesture to queue up the next shot.
  9. Auto Pothole Detector : Mount the 3D camera under a car for pothole detection.  Using this information and GPS it can be sent to the cities pothole backlog for repairs.
  10. Non Intrusive Personal Fitting : Auto detect a persons size at a clothing store to custom size patterns for them.
  11. Queue Watcher : Put camera on store lines and see, not just when they are too long, but when people are getting impatient and fidgety.
  12. Posture Watcher : Use the Kinect camera to monitor your posture.  Use this to help prevent back problems and carpal tunnel.
There is a lot of potential for the technology involved in the XBox Kinect.  I believe that many of the applications of this technology are outside the obvious.  I also think that we will see more applications as natural user interfaces become more common.
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Posted by paulin to Seattle 2.0, Weekly Online Brainstorm on June 20, 2011 at 6:23 am