These are ten varied sketches of potential design directions for the exercising practice, and ten of the variations based on the most promising idea from my sketchbook. I went through the creative processes and exercised some brainstorming and sketching techniques that are crucial to every design at its primary stage.
Since I planned to finish all twenty sketches at one time, it is inevitable to get stuck. Sometimes I just felt like I ran out all my brain cells. Then I started realizing some techniques such as adding, subtracting, rearranging the elements. I found these approaches very helpful when we run out ideas. In addition, in the future, I would brainstorm ideas at different time and places: some inspirations tend to come spontaneously in different environments, so taking notes whenever the inspiration or intuition comes matters a lot to designers or people having creativity-oriented jobs.
Considering some of the ideas were so wild and unrealistic that can’t be achieved within the next few years, when it came to the most promising one, I took into account the desirability and practicability. A cross-platform workout data tracking system is actually highly demanded as tons of health app developed and the obvious gap between the gym equipment and mobile devices needs to be filled. As for viability, although data are inconvertible across platform right now, it is definitely possible to implement existing technologies like USB ports, Bluetooth or NFC as the exporting interfaces. Also, this idea involves system design other than single product design, so I would have more variations and extensions available in terms of multiple levels of design.