World Cafe

This week we did lots of idea generation and concept creation in groups first in world cafe then in our allocated teams. World Cafe broke the class up into small teams seated at individual tables where the group would discuss and evaluate a theme, taken from the presentation ideas. At these tables the theme itself was evaluated and new ideas for this theme were created in a short period of time before the team split up and moved to new tables. At each table one member of the last team would stay to inform the newcomers or 'travelers' of what was discussed last session and to further discussion onto new topics.

Personally I went to tables that interested me, Musical Things, Sassy Tech and Wearable Tech. I would have liked to visit more tables and generate different Ideas however I was selected as the host multiple times as I seemed to grasp new concepts quickly and have a good way of describing them. After these sessions were done we then requested to join groups based off our favourite tables and concepts, mine being the ones above.

Meeting my Team

On the Wednesday of this week we found out our new teams based off our selected concepts and matching timetables, so I joined my team for Sassy Tech, with Lachlan, Zhijang and Shao. We all liked the idea of technology with a personality and worked on mentioning what our interpretations and expectations were, along with writing up a team charter. In the second half of the session, we found a basis for design, using the Hand from the Secret Handshake Lock, and putting it into different applications or to help in other ways.

Here are our inital sketches and ideas for the concept, where I drew lots of different robotic hands and gestures that could be made to give it personality and character. We also had lots of different ideas for the physical appearance of the hand, making it look realistic, or giving it unnerving qualities like extra fingers or multiple thumbs. This can be decided later, as the difference between a metal, flesh, green, extra fingers, elegant, manicured or hairy hand aren't as important as the role it plays and where it will be implemented. This sheet shown depicts some of the evaluation we did as a team to create ideas of where a hand could go, and we narrowed down some of the ideas for feasibility or practicality.