MVIDEA - utility for generating ideas and transforming things

Purpose

Basic transformations, distant analogies, other kinds of idea lists - with this tool you can bring one item at a time for processing, whether doing it by yoursef or in a team in product development, process improvement of any other situation of creative problem solving.

The program's intented user base is people who do any kinds of development work and know how to utilize the creative techniques this tools helps with.

Use

The program does not do anything other than the presents seeds for ideas in prescribed order or randomly. The user does the brainwork and documents the resulting potential ideas to a separate text editor.

1. Quick Start: (1) Select a list from menu List, and (2), then visit the seeds one at a time with Random button. The items in the lists are called seeds, as they become ideas only after you connect them with your context and goals. Make notes on free-choice any way you want.
2. The seeds in the lista may have a logical sequence. So sometimes they can be gone through in a linear fashion (Next, | <, <,>,> |)
3. When you want to focus on a specific sub-areas, a part of a list (if the list is divided in parts), pick one with menu Part.
4. Such processing of the items one by one can be fun teamwork, but sometimes one wants to see the whole list. Use Show whole list button for that.
5. If you wish to go through the same list again, reset it with the Reset button.

EXTRA hint! By checking "Hide top of page and part of navigation controls to minimize information" you can redure screen clutter when working on a list.

Methods

Two of the main ideation methods in brief, as the same principles apply to other lists too:

1) Distant analogies: you can get great new ideas when you thing of analogies in an unrelated context, chosen randomly. It is the users task to figure out what principles the distant something-else expresses and to think how they could be used in the current context / problem.

2) Transformations: an old technique of thinking how the current product, or anything, could be modified by making it larger, smaller, faster, slower... Some ideas my seem funny at first, but may lead to new revelations.

Beside these the application contain many context-dependent lists.

So, you see that this application is meant for people who know how this kind of methods are used.

Have a good time with MVIDEA.

Matti Vuori

APPENDIX: History

I wrote this program originally written as a Windows 3.1 application (in C language) at VTT while researching workplace design practices. Later, it got more idea lists when a need for such arised in other project. At some point I ported it to Web with Javascript. Last (as of writing this in 07/2018) it got some enhancements to its UI and list in 2018. Unfortunably, the latest idea list still lack English translation.