Tuesday Class

Most of Tuesday's class was allocated to watching videos, start critiquing. As a team we watched through and commented together on about half our allocated videos during class. I found it extremely useful that we were able to start this process during contact hours. Not only did that mean that it was easy to organize a group meeting because our entire team was naturally already there but the course staff was available within seconds to answer questions and help with issues. In addition, it was useful to have one of the other teams available to ask questions during this time, and for other teams, we were available.

Thursday Class

After the initial standup during the workshop, our team went to work on our feedbacks, fixing any issues and misconceptions, finally posting them to Miro. Thereafter, we decided on having a group meeting on Monday to plan out our group goals so that we'll be where we want to be by the end of this semester.

Critiquing Process and Thoughts

First during Tuesday's class we went through about half of the videos together, pausing between each one to discuss our ideas. However, by the end of Class Sigurd and I wanted to continue working while the other team members had other engagements. What we decided on was that Sigurd and I would continue watching videos and creating bullet points and comments on the remaining videos and documents. In addition, we converted the comments from everyone on the first half of the videos into a cohesive text so that it would be easier to read and understood by the recipients. After the other team members had a chance to write their own comments on the remaining teams they wrote out the rest in a similar manner. After all feedback was written out all members read through them and made sure that everyone's thoughts and feedback was present. Although this would have been a lot easier to do in person, as most things are, I feel out solution of running the feedback asynchronously was the best way of doing it. I find discussions over video chat are not as good and are often very tiresome. Running our collective feedback asynchronously did so that we were able to, in our own time, write feedback and think through everything in detail and give feedback when we had time. I believe this actually ended up creating better feedback then we would have done over video chat because it became a more iterative process, feedback becoming better with each iteration.

Further Plans

I'm currently trying to figure out what I'll need to do in preparation for my material study and how to best do it. Optimally I would have a selection of materials that participants can touch, this would mean that I could only do this with a small sample size of participants. That said, having the same materials for all users I think would be better than doing a remote test where participants either guess at how materials feel or use objects in their own home, resulting in me having to guess at how they feel. I'll most likely try and create some silicone objects and will try finding some other materials and objects in some stores to gather a greater range. This will be done simultaneously as attempting to connect all team prototypes and whatever we decide on during Monday's meeting.