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Last class was great. Eugene Shteyn came and did a workshop for the majority of class. Originally, we were all curious as to why this workshop did not occur much earlier in the course, for by this time in the semester, we are all extremely frustrated with the brainstorming that must take place between our groups of diverse thinkers, however, after today we had a better understanding of why.

Talking about invention and innovation, we discussed the example of crow who would drop a nut from a wire line, wait for a car to smash it, wait for the cross walk to display the walk sign, and go retrieve it's meal. We thought this, incredible for a crow, yet tedious and silly should a human attempt to do the same. Looking a bit further into this example, I searched the web to find out how people would crack nuts without a nut cracker. First of all, the fact that a number of instructional sites had directions for how a person should retrieve the insides of this food was surprising, as well as the complexity involved in their answers.




This changed my mind on how silly it would seem for a person to attempt the crow's feat, for although the steps are different, they remain similarly tedious.

We looked at examples of inventions and spoke of seemingly good ideas that turn bad due to circumstances and/or timing. An example that was explained was a spandex type material in a time of great obesity- changing trends clearly change the success of a product.

What I found interesting, as well, was the comparisons of yahoo and google. Discussion about why google has been so wildly successful and yahoo has fallen behind.

The most important part of this workshop to me and my group, was the brainstorming. We spoke a little bit about brainstorming and further, did a whole lot of brainstorming, as well. The reverse brainstorming session was great for moving my group forward. It was easy to agree upon problems our project would face, and by writing them on a BIG piece of paper, allowed us all to see it, read it, and come back to it as often as necessary. We could easily point things out to each other, and releasing all these potential problems that get pushed around from the very front to the very back of our minds, now shared a common place. A place where instead of being one person's responsibility to remember this problem, it became a problem for the group to address head on.

Walking to class on Friday I was extremely curious as to how it would go, after a week of increased frustration and stress, however this was the best class we have had all semester (in my opinion), and were offered intriguing material, great discussion, and interactions, as well as actually brainstorming and moving forward on our projects, as well.