challenge

Inspired by the PhizzPop Design Challenge Boston

As some will remember, a little more than a year ago now, Outsight participated in (and won) the PhizzPop Design Challenge - Boston that was sponsored by Microsoft late in 2007. You can check out both our process and the resulting solution. The big take-away for the team (other than the three XBox 360's, that is) was the intense collaborative team experience that came out of working within the constraints of a three-day contest. In fact, Outsight team members who couldn't participate in the contest felt a little left out. The contest rules limited the teams to three people. So, Outsight has decided to reprise the experience to include our entire team.

Design Challenge Reprise

Next week, the Outsight team is going to stage our own Design Challenge. We will take three days to collaborate on a "Research & Development" project of our own choosing. We'll be trying out new techniques and exploring new processes and innovations without the constraints (and potential risks) of experimenting on client work.

Have a challenge for us?

Although we are busy coming up with challenge ideas of our own, it occurred to us to open it up to the larger community to submit potential challenges to our team. Do you have an interactive problem that you wish there were an elegant solution for? Then submit it to us, but please note:

• Do NOT submit ideas that are of a proprietary nature to you (or anyone else) as we plan to keep all rights to anything that we create as a result of this exercise and will likely publish it via our blog, portfolio or other means.
• We do NOT promise to choose from any of the ideas that are submitted to us, but will consider them.
• IF an idea is selected from those that are submitted, we don't guarantee that we will pursue it in the way that you intended. Our plan is to innovate, so we aren't looking to execute on a "solution" so much as we are looking to "solve a problem".
• We make no promises to have a working solution at the end of three days. We'll be aiming for a solid, cohesive concept (or several) or perhaps even a prototype.
• We make no promises that current technology necessarily supports the solution that we come up with. Although we are definitely based in reality, some times you have to dream a little bit to innovate.
• Although it is our intent to share the results, we don't promise that we will do so.