The process of taking ideas into reality, an ex post facto framework

Abstract

The process of taking an idea into reality has long fascinated me. Throughout the course of college, I have had the privilege of helping to create three varying projects: a workshop designing custom-machined clock faces, a business card startup project, and MIT's first fully unified live music student organization. With this diverse set of projects and parameters, I came to question if they held a common process. Though the topic of idea development deserves greater investigation and empirical study, I offer here a set of personal case studies. I do this with the full knowledge that the world offers an enormous amount of variability, where factors and changes beyond my control are unceasingly at play. I, too, changed much throughout these projects, and therefore, I, as an author, am also subject to a certain amount of variability and change over time. All those notions given, I do believe that there exist shared traits in the ways that I was able to help grow and nourish the ideas into real projects. My main finding is an ex post facto framework that each of the projects fits within. To elucidate how this framework applies and provide substantial background to justify each step, I have derived a thorough explanation of how each project used each piece of the framework. Curious if this framework held validity given real-world constraints, I interviewed four industry professionals to understand their views and project experiences. I have included their paraphrased thoughts and experience interspersed throughout the framework in order to provide my framework with greater support and empirical validity. Once again, this is a personal case study that is open for interpretation. It is, in many ways, the application of the design process to highly variable real-world projects executed in the context of a college experience.