Our second assignment of the semester was to brainstorm and prototype a bunch of different ideas that could solve the problem of trash collecting in Houston’s waterways.  At first the task seemed easy enough, just come up with ten ideas and make them out of low fidelity materials.  After brainstorming my first four ideas, though, I really had to think about the issue in order to come up with different types of solutions.

  First, I thought of a device similar to a Roomba.  It’s a ball that rolls on the floor of the waterway, while magnetic projections collect any trash that is attracted to it.  My second idea was an attachment for kayaks, since people often kayak down the waterways for fun.  The idea was a net that would go on the back of the kayak, so as the kayak-er moves around, the net would drag behind and collect debris in the water.

  This is how my first two ideas came out after translating my thoughts into physical prototypes.

As I continued brainstorming ideas for this problem, I found myself spending a lot of time trying to think of different ways of using devices that involved nets.  One idea was a large net that would span the entire width of the waterway.  This would be particularly useful in collecting trash floating downstream, but not so much with picking trash up off the bottom.  Another idea was to have buoys floating along the waterway, with nets attached to the bottom of them.  This solution would make the task of retrieving the trash relatively easy.

Here are the rest of my ideas on paper: 

And here is how they all turned out once I was finished prototyping!

The whole exercise was really enjoyable.  It was interesting to try to build my ideas and not worry too much on precision, but rather focusing on communicating my ideas to other people.