The most interesting part about my time at Forthright today came after lunch, when Steve, Bryan, and another engineer named Graydon met together to talk about new internal projects. A lot of the work that the company does comes from clients, people who have this idea that they need someone else to create for them. However, they also occasionally meet to discuss ideas the engineers have thought of for new products they could create. The meeting consisted of the engineers creating a list of concepts they had brainstormed and explaining the rationale behind each idea and what the market for that product is like now. They then ranked their top three ideas and the ones with the most votes were noted to be researched later and followed up on. During this ideation process, I saw many aspects of group brainstorming that I’ve been taught in robotics and art and design. No concepts were rejected or thought of as bad ideas, and everyone was open each other’s thoughts, instead of being close-minded and only focusing on what they had thought of. This type of objective conversation helped the engineers reach an agreement of which products they thought were best to pursue efficiently and without overlooking anyone’s thoughts.
