BLOG ENTRY 2 (Week 4)

Week 4

     SCAMPER

Welcome back to my blog!! This week, Mr Chua introduced us to SCAMPER which is a tool that helps us generate more ideas form our original idea. SCAMPER is an acronym for S - Substitute, C - Combine, A - Adapt, M - Modify, P - Put to another use, E - Eliminate, R - Reverse. We had to use 3 out of the 7 letters to come up with ≤ 10 new ideas that can help us tackle the same problem. My group managed to use 3 of the letters to come up with 5 different ideas. 

• Substitute contemporary refrigerants with a more energy efficient refrigerant.
• Modify the existing TEV of a refrigerator to increase the efficiency of the refrigerator.
• Combine different types of refrigerants to increase efficiency of the refrigerator.
• Modify the design of the refrigerator to increase its efficiency.

SCAMPER actually allowed us to come up ideas very efficiently. It made us think outside of the box as we had to figure out how to modify/change a refrigerator into something more environmentally friendly. We also made use of our literature review when doing SCAMPER as our literature review provided us with different ways a fridge can be modified. We had a lot of fun bouncing ideas off each other and finding out how they corelate to the various letters in SCAMPER

FEASABILITY ANALYSIS

 

Feasibility analysis allowed us to filter out ideas that couldnt be carried out due to the limitations and limited resources that we have. This allowed us to narrow down our various ideas to a limited few so that we can be more decisive as to which idea we would want to use. Fortunately, most of our ideas were all very feasible and could be carried out within the limitations.

 

COWS MATRIX

After doing feasibility analysis, we managed to filter down to 3 ideas. From here, we carried out COWS matrix to help us filter down to one idea only. We first had to decide on the 5 criteria that we wanted to judge the ideas on. These criteria were quite tough to come up with as we felt that there were too many to choose from. Deciding on the weightages was also a challenge for us as we felt that most of these criteria are equally important. However if they all had the same weightage, we wouldnt be able to filter effectively. After quite some time, we managed to come up with 5 different criteria and their appropriate weightages that would help us filter through the ideas. Below is the criteria that we chose and the reason as to why we chose it.

After deciding on the different criteria, we then had to put our ideas through the COWS matrix to decide which idea we wanted to use. It wasnt easy giving the raw scores for the various ideas as most of thee raw scores for the ideas were the same for the same criteria. We realised that this wasnt very effective and had to judge it more strictly. We then made the following COWS decision matrix.

Overall, our COWS matrix wasnt the most perfect one but we were happy that we managed to filter down to just one idea which was idea #3 as it is scored the highest on the COWS matrix. 

WOW you managed to stay till the end of the blog!! Stay tuned for the next blog!!