For Tuesday's studio class, we had a stand up as per usual, talking about how far along our team have come in the process and what we are planning to do next. I find these stand-ups to be wasteful given that we spend a lot of time doing something that does not move our project forward. I would prefer it if each group had their own breakout room and a tutor came by to check in on the progress as this would be far more valuable.

After the stand-up, we moved on to an online exercise using the tool MIRO. Our task was to find a way to conduct user research in COVID times and how to get valuable first-hand data without the need of meeting face-to-face. For this task, I looked up a youtube video of passengers on a train and observed their behaviour. Although I can see why the teacher team wanted to make us student open our eyes to the possibilities that still exist, I didn't find it overly helpful as the exercise wasn't relatable to conducting a prototype test, which is the next assessment piece in the course. I find that I get the most value out of meeting- and discussing with the team instead of performing stand-ups and these types of tasks as they take away time that we could have spent on our project.

The next task on MIRO was really helpful to us. Even though we already had a good understanding of our concept, it is always nice to map out the complexity and fully comprehend the quirks and commonalities of the project you are working on. Our team sat down together and went through our concept and tried to map out as much as possible to further define our concept as can be seen in the pictures below.

From this exercise, some new questions emerged that we had to take into consideration when working on our prototypes and conducting user research. These questions were such as: "does it need to be a ball?"; "is flashing lights the best metaphors for incoming messages?"; "is sound the best input and output?"; "Can it be anything else than a bowl?"; "Is squeeze the best interaction?"; "Is the living room the best place for it?" and more. These questions are important to consider moving forward and to include in our upcoming user research. Moreover, from this exercise, we did figure out that our target audience was rather vague and needed more working on.

On Thursday we had a Arduino tutorial. Having already worked with Arduino previously I found the content too basic and decided to instead focus on refining the assignment prior to delivery. Moreover, our team sat down to order the parts we needed so that we could get them in time for our next deadline. We decided to purchase our parts with express delivery to get a headstart on the prototype.