Week 2 Entry 12: Reviewing the Reviews

Amraj Singh Sukhdev Singh - Fri 6 March 2020, 8:55 pm
Modified: Fri 6 March 2020, 10:18 pm

Reviewing the feedback I've received, I'd initially thought that the negative feedback outweighed the positive, and that most people, like me, thought that the idea was complete garbage. I consider the vast majority of my work to be at this standard. However, this was untrue when actually counting up the number of positive and negative responses (vs indetermined responses that were just ticks for the caregories of relevance and communication)

The pace of my pitch (and possibly the fact that I went up first on that day) meant that several students couldn't understand my idea - I wouldn't blame them either, because their feedback was in broken english, it likely meant that it was their second or third language.

I think it was rather inconsiderate of me to not consider the fact that I'm presenting to an international audience, which would mean adjusting not just how quickly I present things, but also the visual assistance I use (I didn't bother with a detailed poster), and the cultural considerations of what information is most critical. In a way, preparing for a presentation is like preparing a design for your users, just with that design being something you speak instead of visually demonstrate.

I need to be more compassionate next time... which is not asking for a lot, but it's quite a bit easier to brush it off and say "bah, they should just get better at english" , which would be the response I'd have given to this feedback had I received it two years ago - but ignores the fact that people have different and complex circumstances behind why they have trouble with the language.

Furthermore, it's more than just the fact that the time given to provide feedback was limited, there were several thoughts that were half finished that I thought were interesting, but couldn't make sense of without additional context. I think that if I spoke to these people in person, we'd be able to come to something useful, because the reasoning would be more apparent. If they treated the activity the same as me, then it would be a side task, something to keep them active while listening to the pitch, rather than fading out of the classroom during the downtime, so no harm done.

Of the ones that were positive, much of the reaction was that this device would be useful for someone who didn't know how to cook... that was my target audience, but I'd assumed that the implication of "It teaches you how to hold a knife" was that" someone who doesn't know how to safely use a knife, cannot cook.... I think I overestimated how much would be delivered with each line of the pitch.

Another common thread of feedback was that the device should be more "smart", in that it should do more things with scanning and tracking you, or having additional functionalities... but in truth, I feel those features, while interesting, would require the idea to be a smart kitchen instead of just a social robot thats also a knife...

This, to me takes away from the aspect of "you're working with the tool to make something, it's not just a smart tool that sits quietly the entire day until you press a button and it finishes a task for you". I may have a future post that covers potential additions... but looking at the themes we have, it feels like Kitchen Kriminal is probably headed to the electric chair, and I may have a new ... thing to work on in its place.

In hindsight, I think I could have said more on this topic, but in keeping with some more resolutions to just post what I have, and revisit ideas later when I have more to add, I'll sign off on this here as I have an additional post ready to go.