Between last post and this week

After my last post in Week 5, the group divided tasks for the report and wrote over the weekend. My part for the team section was the "Response to feedback" as well as describing the initial inquiry we did. I found it interesting to connect the dots back to where we started and see how far we have come. After each team member had written their part, it became apparent that there were still some gaps to be determined in our concept. Next section describes how we solved that. I also sketched out the storyboards for our report. Initially, we had only one story with positive emotions, but I suggested a scenario where we could use positive emotions to lift up negative emotions too, which I felt gave a better picture of a broader use of the concept.

Tuesday Class activity

In the Tuesday class, we did report back and then some activities. Although much shorter, and somewhat nice to hear about what people are doing over easter, the report back part of the lecture is to me still quite unnecessary. It is difficult to hear what people are saying and as we are trying to keep it short, it doesn't feel like it is giving much value to hear 'that someone has started prototyping'. Hearing about some people idea's and how they have been developed could be interesting, but so far it is too many people to give enough insight for it to give me any value.

The next activity, however, was quite interesting I think. It really encouraged us to explore new ways of doing user research. The document has been sent to us before, but this was the first time I actually opened it and was encouraged/motivated to read through and explore it. It actually gave me inspiration for methods of exploration for my individual part of the project. The miro board was a bit messy and difficult to navigate in, and different sized made it hard for me (on my computer at least) to skim through the other answers, but it worked as a way of collaborating compared to just typing it locally.

The last activity for the class was to together with the team fill in a miro board to define our concept thoroughly. We thought we already knew everything about our idea, but wanted to complete the miro board of it to ensure we 1) Had everything defined and 2) All agreed on details on the idea. We did discover that our target audience was rather vague (in the report it was described as "people who are close with other people"), and together we agreed on a user group. The miro board also encouraged us to agree on some specific details of the concept, like timeframe and materials. Below is a snippet of our miro board.

Further teamwork

After this class, we had a meeting where we decided who were doing which part of the prototype. Initially, when trying to decide which parts each person could do, we got slightly nervous that we might not have enough work. Later, when we finished writing our individual parts, I saw that we were able to come up with a lot of interesting questions and research methods for each individual part. This means that even though the technical part for this initial prototyping round might (might) be small, we still have a lot to explore and research, which in the end will benefit the full prototype.

I found it difficult to create a full plan for the full prototype because so many of our parts or future plans were determined by user research. We have a lot of add-on ideas for the concept, but it is hard to tell now which ones to go for and not.

Thursday workshop

The Thursday workshop was an Arduino tutorial. Although I have worked with Arduino before, it was good to get a more basic understanding of how to read the circuit sketches. We ordered some parts we might need for the prototype on this day as well, and hopefully, they will be here soon. We paid extra for fast shipping as we realised that the Auxiliary kits might not get there in time.

General thoughts

This week and last week has been a lot of work with the report, and the journal has suffered a bit from that, unfortunately. I have done a lot of work but there is no point in re-stating everything I have done, as it will become apparent in the report nevertheless. I personally think we have done a good job in refining and asking questions with the new concept. I am a lot more confident with this concept than the last one, and hopefully, it could become meaningful to someone.