Prepare for the Pitch

In week 4, we delivered the concept pitch by a recorded video during the class zoom session. It was new and challenging for all of us for the first time. Once I get used to the pace, it gets easier to carry on. Compared to listen presentation in a class, it's actually more easy to concentrate on the actual content and giving more thoughtful feedback.

The exploration for the globe is the first thing I did in the week, by searching and looking at the different projects by utilising the same object "globe", I got some basic idea of how could the prototype could be build look like.

We had two meetings before the pitch. The first meeting shared everyone's idea for the concept, discuss the details concerting three main parts of the concept. Then the second meeting to make sure everyone get ready for all the material we need for the presentation. It's a bit stressful for me at this part because the individual part should be finished by some of the team member could be done in time and keep putting off for about two days. This defiantly affected the whole process of the presentation making. And result in the last minute work done, and some mistakes appears in the video. I learnt from this time and hope this situation won't be happen again in the future.

I'm part of the duty for slides making, script writing, voiceover recording and the video editing. To be more specific, Kuan and I were working on bringing all the content together to make sure our concept could be converted clearly and comprehensibly into the audience. After finished the final draft of the illustration, we had a finalized version of our concept. We spent 3 hours working on the slides and scripts together to structure the whole presentation. After that I collected the individual part video and audio from Jay and Eddie to pull all the materials together. I did the overall job of voiceover for the video and it's still a challenge for me. I hope I did communicate our idea clear and sounds attractive for the audience, although I still doubt it and know that there are something I could improve and well for the next time.

Concept further exploration

After the pitch session, we got some feedback directly from Lorna and other tutors on Zoom. We also discussed further more in a private zoom meeting with Alison and Clay right after the class. Based on the feedback from both teaching team and peers, we had three major concerns for the further concept developing.

input - how could the user's data input be more interactive and entertaining
expression ways of the globe - how could the impact of the input could be shown more directly on the globe, then give the user an impressive feeling
output - a summary result of the collaborated work all users get involved, an actionable advice/suggestion for the behaviour changing in future daily life would be ideal

At the meeting on this Friday, we shared about the basic understanding of concept and discussed further more of how wee going to be work as a team in the next step. We went through the team proposal report doc I setup on Google drive together, to make sure everyone understand what we are about to do. We went through the feedback altogether again to make understand what parts haven’t been consider thoroughly in our concept. Although we tried to have another round of brainstorming at that time, it's difficult for everyone to have some new ideas from new angles. We kind of stuck in the loop that could think out of what we had so far. At here, I suggested we have a pause at this point, to let everyone have some new input during the time before the next meeting. The tasks for every team member were: 1.to think of two possible interaction way to let the user input their daily behaviour/habit; 2.to find two peer-reviewed academic research papers related our concept. Then we will have another meeting on Sunday to hear everyone's report back then move forward. The particular I make those tasks for everyone is I found it's hard to work remotely from home and doing the team meeting online. We a;ll tend to be demotivated and lose the focus on the concept developing progress. It's also difficult to narrow down into certain area that each individual will focus on(at least for myself when I tried to do the further research). I wish by doing these tasks, all team members will have a more clear goal for both team proposed concept and their individual concept exploration.

Lastly, we had another meeting at Sunday afternoon as a report back session. Each of us shared the outcomes of the two given tasks and discussed a bit further. According to the research paper each individual chose, I can sense the different focus that everyone's currently get more interested in. For the input methods everyone came up with, I could also have a rough understanding of everyone's preferred interaction mode. This is a good exploration for everyone I would like to say. Personally I found one papers researched on multi-sensory flavour perception and one project regarding designing a smell-based interaction. Therefore, at this stage I'm more interested in build the smell/flavour feature or function for the globe. In next week I will still looking at different aspects to see what other functions have been explored so far in the current research and practice area.

Finally, at the end of this week our team allocated every breakdown section in the team-based proposal report and set the proof-reading time one day before the deadline. It's not like we are going to focus completely individually for our own project, we are still going to keep the communicate channel open and support for each other. On the Tuesday session next week, we are planning to ask the teaching team the implementing details of our concept especially asking for the technical support. Then the regular team meeting will be held right after the session.

Hopefully in next week, I could decide which certain are I would like to put the focus on and have a rough idea of what kind of prototype I'm going to build for the rest of the semester.