Brainstorming + Discussion

I found brain storming the Tipping Point in relation to design interesting, we discussed mainly crime and spread of disease but found some areas overlapped with one another. Lots of interesting ideas came up and there was much discussion about whether things would or would not work and how they could work better. Bouncing lots of ideas around lead us to build on one another’s ideas. For example starting a car using voice recognition was suggested to reduce the likelihood of car theft I then suggested a pin number could be entered. Later we came back to this idea when discussing identity theft, I know of someone who recently got contacted by the bank as someone was trying to illegally use her card details to top up a mobile phone. The bank were suspicious as this was an Orange phone and the account had a direct debit set up to O2 to pay a monthly contract so the top-up was disallowed. Somehow this person had got hold of all of the necessary bank details in order to attempt to use money from an account illegally. Getting rid of the bankcard could perhaps help reduce identity theft as even though pin numbers are used it is sometimes difficult to shield the keypad when entering your pin number and online banking could be made more secure. Could details be made more difficult to obtain from a bank card? Could a fingerprint scan or iris scan could be used instead? Other interesting ideas ranged from the activation of hospital and school doors by dispensing antibacterial hand lotion to the re-design of a hospitals layout, alcohol allowance cards and drive in wheel clamp parking spaces.After the brainstorm I felt we had come up with many ideas but the discussion definitely helped to develop my thoughts and ideas. I felt it made sense to combine all of my own thoughts and many of those we discussed in a mind map. I thought briefly about design in relation to the law of the few, the stickiness factor and the power of context but concentrated on crime and the spread of disease, which were the two areas in which we had discussed and I was most interested. After the discussion and compiling all of my ideas I was most interested in researching more in to crime and how crime could be reduced using design and in particular textile design. Initially I thought it was quite a daunting prospect. But I began to research car crime, personal safety and identity theft.

My main interests range from creating a protective garment to reduce the likelihood of mugging/rape/stabbing etc to the installation of iris scanners in stores and at cash points to confirm that the identity of the cardholder matches the details on the card in order to reduce identity theft. Researching the possibilities of a drive in wheel clamp car parking space to reduce car theft could also be interesting. My only problem is deciding which idea to go with!?

Below are some images of the brainstorming session.