The concept selection matrix is a tool that lets us take a set of concepts, for instance, these ten that

we generated for the ice cream scoop example, and evaluate them in a way that we can narrow the set of alternatives to a relatively few, that we could expand on and evaluate further. As its name implies, the concept selection matrix has as its heart, a matrix. The columns of the matrix are the concepts that we're evaluating. So, for instance, we might call these A, B, C, and D. It's sometimes nice to draw a little sketch. Or to put the textual description of the concept at the head of each column. The rows of the matrix are of the criteria. I like the criteria to be the key needs. So, in this case, I've shown four key needs. And, almost always, there are three additional criteria that apply in the design of almost any artifact. And they are cost, or some measure of economic efficiency of delivering the artifact. Wow. That is how interesting, fundamentally interesting novel or unexpected is the concept. And, elegance and beauty. Now, you should remember that when we talked about what makes for a good concept, we said first and foremost, it meets the needs, it has low cost or is efficient in terms of the value it delivers. It has some wow and it's elegant and beautiful. So, those form the criteria for the selection matrix. Our concepts are the columns. And, what we do in evaluating and using the matrix is to evaluate each concept with respect to each criterion. So, for instance, if we were to take cost as the criterion, we might say, well, the least expensive concept is a square. This is obviously the, the most expensive cuz it has all these extra corners. And maybe circles and triangles are about equally expensive to produce. And, the convention that I like to use for representing that goes something like this. I give a plus for the square, I give a minus for the arrow, and then I use just a

check to in, to indicate the midpoint of, of the, of the scale. So, I have just a simple scale. The midpoint which I indicate with a check. You can also use a zero if you wanted, and a plus to indicate that it's better, and a minus to indicate that it's worse. So, note that, even though I use the term cost here, these are, the convention I like is that the criteria are, are worded such that or interpreted such that a plus means the concept is better, with respect to that, to that criterion and a minus means that it's worse with respect to that criterion. So, once you've done that for all the other concepts, for all the other criteria, You can then sum up the, The, the net score. So, in just this fanciful example, concept A, the triangle had three plus's. Concept D, the arrow had a minus, and B and C were tied in the middle with a net ze, effectively a net zero. So that's the idea conceptually. Now, what I'd like to do is show you the idea for the ice cream scoop and I'm going to go ahead and use a Google Doc spreadsheet to make this a little easier. So here, you can see a concept selection matrix for the ice cream scoop implemented as a spreadsheet. And that's certainly easier in terms of creating a digital document and, and computing the tally. But just to be clear about what's done here, The, the ten concepts from the con, from the exploration we did are shown here. They're labeled A through J, and I've put the descriptive titles here as well. Now, in a spreadsheet, it's a little bit hard to add the sketch here, although that's nice. And, some of you, if you're clever, with how to insert an image can figure out how to do that, but the important thing is that you list your concepts as the columns. And then, the criteria, remember I said that the three, The categories of criteria were first, key needs, and then almost always, from most settings, you care about the cost, you care about the wow factor, and you care about elegance and beauty. Now, the key needs, you can put all of the needs or its unwieldy to put all of the

needs in your selection matrix. So typically, you want to pick the few that are most important and that best differentiate your concept. So here, I put, the three key needs I put for the scoop are first, That it's quick and easy to, to use. And that's a little bit of a catchall around the ergonomics and ease of use of the scoop. Second, that the scoop is effective in removing all of the material from the container, that is, it can get into all of the corners and cracks in order to remove all the material without having to use an extra spoon. And, and the third criterion, The third key need is that the scoop lets the user create a nice shape for the ball, since that's one of the, the things that an ice cream scoop does. And then, you can see here, I've put in my subjective judgement as to the relative performance of the ten concepts with respect to the three, four, five, six criteria. Again, I use the convention in a spreadsheet of a +one for better than, a -one for worse than. And I use a zero to represent the midpoint of the scale. So, this scale has only three values even or parity +one and -one. And, when you do this, you should make sure that your scale has, You do a reality check, which is that your best concept is a one, your worst concept is a minus one, and the ones in the middle are a zero. And that, that scale is applied in a consistent way across the concepts. Now, in some cases, it makes sense to add some notes, So that's easily done in the spreadsheet. So, I made an annotation here that, that you, the reason that the, the swoop scoop is okay with respect to this criterion is that you can use the back of the handle to get into the corners. And, in this one, I noted that, well, the punch and twist doesn't create a very nice ball. Some people might perceive that cylindrical plug shape to be interesting. So, that is maybe a questionable rating with respect to that criterion. Then, what you do is a simple tally which is to just sum the values in the column and that gives you a net score.

Now, if you notice, four of these concepts all had a tide score of one. The punch and twist, the claw, the push and pivot, and the twist ball. And one of them, the swoop scoop, had a high value of four. Now, there's a couple of things to note here. One is that, you shouldn't get too excited at this point and that this is a very rough approximation. Yes, the swoop scoop has a lot of promise. But we haven't even tried it yet to know if it works. So, we wouldn't want to bet exclusively on this concept at this point. The other thing to note is that, as you look at this concept E, You realize that it's conceptually very similar to the swoop scoop. In fact, the only real difference is that the push and pivot has a rectangular form to the shovel and the swoop scoop has a cylindrical form to the scoop or the shovel and, a spherical form. And so, They're, they're actually quite similar and, and I decided that in going forward here, it made sense to focus on these five concepts. But that, I wouldn't proceed, I wouldn't prototype concept E because it was so similar to concept G. And so, that really leaves me with four concepts that I'm taking forward. The swoop scoop, the twist ball, the claw, and the punch and twist as the four concepts that would result from the selection matrix. Now, the more left-brain among you, have at least two objections or concerns about this method. The first is, you say, well, wait a second, this implies that all of these criteria are equally important. What if I decide that having the nice shape to the ball is not nearly as important as having it be quick and easy. Wouldn't it make sense to somehow weight the quick and easy greater than the nice shaped ball? And the answer is, absolutely. And, and, we're going to, I'm going to show you is the optional video a tool called the Scoring Matrix which allows you to add weight-ins to these criteria. You might also observe, or say, hey, wait a second. There's only three levels of evaluation here from +one to -one, with zero in the

middle. That's not nearly enough resolution for me to distinguish across ten different concepts. I hear you on that and that's also a weakness that's addressed in the concept scoring matrix. Now, those of you who are more right-brain have two objections yourselves. The first is that, hey, wait a second. We can't really reduce everything in life to a quantitative evaluation and I'd really like to make a more holistic judgement of the qualities of these concept. And, I hear you on that. And, I think it's good discipline to see if you can get the concept selection matrix to be consistent with your intuition. That suggests that you've been able to capture what's really behind your intuition and that will benefit you when you go to communicate that your rational to other people. Maybe to the more left-brain of the stakeholders that you have to deal with. And, you're also, some of you will also object that, hey, wait a second. Aren't you just cooking these results to make it consistent with, With what you really want the answer to be? And, again, and quite similarly I would say, If you can get the selection matrix to be very consistent with your intuition, then it's a nice way of codifying what it is that you're intuition is telling you. And that will serve well to document your results and to communicate to others.