Drop is a water meter that clips onto a home's pipe and shows the household how much water it uses. I designed it at California College of the Arts as a complete out-of-box experience: the app, a 3D-printed sensor made with my roommate, an industrial designer, the box it ships in and a short film.
With my classmates, I ran the ideation as a cheatstorm. Haakon Faste, my professor on this project, developed the method with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon's HCI Institute. It skips coming up with new ideas. You take ideas that already exist and point them at the problem you're solving.
We drew one sticky from a stack of real brands, like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, and one from a stack of wacky or failed startups, like human-powered monorails and public voicemail, then asked what the pair would do about household water use. We ranked the results from crazy to not so crazy, from an "Amazon Dash for H2O" to a live map of how a house uses water. The app grew from that last one.