Structured brainstorming exercise

Steve and I have been talking about how to generate ideas on how software engineering research can be applied to the climate crisis.

Here's an idea for a structured brainstorming exercise that's inspired by Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats technique. Instead of the thinking hats that de Bono suggests we instead have a hat for each software engineering sub-discipline (e.g. requirements analysis, software design, formal methods, software testing/quality, etc..). The brainstorming is done with participants "wearing" only one of these Research Hats at a time; while wearing a hat the participant focuses on thinking about applying only their hat's research area to a given problem.

We gather a list of climate change issues, and get participants to brainstorm research problems that come out of each issue applicable to their research area.

Using research area Hats is purely a technique to focus the brainstorming conversations, so that they stay within software engineering and so that we make sure to get a variety of viewpoints on each issue. I imagine the exercise carried out in teams, with each team taking turns all wearing the same hat, and flipping through the various issues. It also makes sense to dispense with the research hat idea if the participants are experts in one particular sub-discipline, in which case the exercise is simply, "How can your research, or research discipline, be applied to this issue?"

Our weekly climate change chats have explored some rough ideas of the issues. See these posts for my thematic summary of our discussions.