Melissa Chukri Design Portfolio
Cortex
The Immersive Collaborative Brainstorming System
Given the task to create a creativity enhancement tool our team ideated on the early process of designing. In today's tech era many students automatically think "the answer is some kind of smart-phone app." But this way of thinking is extremely limiting and we wanted to reach beyond this norm and explore options that would truly solve our user's needed.
User Research
We interviewed students, entrepreneurs, and working professionals to understand how people are creative in vastly different environments.
Persona
We developed Kai from the information we received from our interviews, the user behind out product, he was working with a new team and they faced many typical creativity blocks. We used Kai and his group to drive our design decisions.
Storyboard
We had no limits to our creativity for this tool so we explored ideas of virtual reality web applications and finally landed on a creation enhancement space, a smart interactive "white boarding" system. Cortex allowed users to have their own individual space to draw, write and use other tools to brainstorm as many ideas as possible.
After the initial brainstorming, idea dumping sessions were complete, team members come together and work through activities based on DeBuno's Thinking Hats.
Ideally, through this thorough process teams will have deduced their ideas to the best solution. If not teams can ideate again, brainstorm on a focused idea ultimately guiding them to their perfect solution. Below is a link for our final prototype that visually shows what Cortex could look and feel like on a smaller scale. We've also created some visual designs of what we imagine Cortex could look like on a large interactive whiteboard system. A demonstration of Cortex is published to this Axure Prototype link.