Work Done & How it Relates

World Cafe

Round 1: Exploring the theme/domain

Round 2: Audience/Context

Round 3: Refining a concept

I should have taken more photos but from the top of my head, I was at Enhancing Mundane Spaces(also host), Musical Things, Creative Learning(also host), and Body as Controller. I think the tables that most excited me were Creative Learning and Enhancing Mundane Spaces because we came up with some really cool concepts.

One of the concepts was finding a way to make grocery shopping less boring and Mario-Kartifying the trolleys was proposed. Another concept was a 360 degree see-saw plaything which was adapting the Chroma concept to help children learn how to work as a team and achieve a specific colour. We played with the scale of it and exhausted the idea so moved onto refining another concept. We then looked at how Mort could be improved to not just teach morse code. I thought Mort might be a great personified grammar helper that would teach children proper grammar and sentence structure by instructing them to produce a sentence with a Subject, Verb, Object, or sayign a sentence and telling the user to pull a specific leg when the word is a Noun, Verb, etc.

In Musical Things, there was a lot of talk about showing music as more than just sound so having it as a vibration, visual effects, and having music as a community experience for all to enjoy and not just professionals. The main experience that influence my thoughts in this space was when I got out of high school (I was a band geek) and realised I couldn't join a band unless I was studying music professionally or doing the music courses at UQ as an elective (in addition to auditioning).

There were some really awesome discussions during the World Cafe and I liked that we could visualise the idea on the paper even if we couldn't find the words for what we had in mind. I noticed there were some rounds that were a bit quiet at the start but once we had a spark flowing it was very lively. The conversation dying down was a pretty good indicator that we could probably talk about a different concept or prompt-question.

At the end of the World Cafe, we put our preferences in and waited for the results of teams to be announced the next day. I put my preferences down as

1. Creative Learning
2. Enhancing Mundane Spaces
3. Musical Things

I know at the start of the semester I was keen to move away from the "educational" theme of my previous projects but I think I have to accept that I'll always be passionate about helping others realise that learning is enjoyable. There were also a few people in each theme that I was keen to work with and I didn't put my preferences down immediately because I wanted to kindof scope out who else was interested in the same themes as me.

Bash Isai - Guest Speaker

On Wednesday morning, Bash Isai zoomed in from London where it was 11pm there. He told us some really useful career/life advice about selling yourself as a very hire-able employee and being the one that can lessen the stress of the person hiring.

We completed an activity which involved describing ourselves in 50 words, then crossing them out gradually until it got down to one word. My word was analyse. I think it represents me best because I like to gather information before making decisions regardless of whether it's work-related or in daily life. I am the type of person that will watch 27484473 review videos of the thing I'm considering buying, and I tend to straight up ask my friends what they want for their birthday instead of taking the risk that they won't like what they get.

This activity was pretty useful because I did another video interview the day after and I was able to pivot my answers better as an employable candidate. Still scary and terrifying to do those recorded video interviews but I guess it only gets better with practice and over a long long period of time.

Team (Four)mation

Team allocations were released after the morning break and I ended up being in Team 4 with Nelson, Summer and Rhea with the theme of Creative Learning. We spent until lunch getting to know each other and writing up our team agreement. Our skills are spread out and I'm looking forward to working together to create something really cool. I said I was good at documentation and we all agreed that communication is really fundamental. It was helpful to talk about our past group experiences and the issues we faced in them, as well as discuss our work tendencies and productive periods in the day. We all like when goals are met and like to have the motivation and pressure of milestones and deadlines with the flexibility to change depending on circumstances and factors (which is where communication plays a vital role).

Lorna went through the methods and what we needed to do for next week, then we went off to lunch.

After the lunch break we finalised the terms of our team agreement and thought about possible concepts we could explore in the space of Creative Learning. I told them about my two ideas of Mort as a grammar/sentence structure buddy and Chroma as a 3D interactive seesaw thing. Summer had a really interesting take on the pressure feature of Chroma where students could have a pressure sensitive button that they could press to help the teacher understand how confused they are about the content in the classroom. If the student presses harder, they are more confused. It would reflect the cognitive pressure on the student without "outing" them to the class, thereby helping shy students who might not be brave enough to raise their hand and ask for help.

We also signed up to present 2nd on Tuesday. Our team name is still yet to be determined but we joked about keeping it as Team 4 or calling ourselves 3+1 (because it equals 4, and also because that's how many girls and guys we have).

Since there wasn't enough time to discuss all the concepts we wanted to, we set aside some work to think of some concepts and discuss them on Monday. I thought of an Art Abstraction concept where 3D shapes are magnetised and can produce "real life" images when the user combines the shapes and sees them through an AR lens. Initially this meeting on Monday was going to be on campus but Rhea suggested doing it remotely due to the CoVid-19 situation so we've got a Zoom link set up and our Google Document for the Idea Discussion.

Gluing my box together

I decided to grab Weldbond Universal Adhesive from Bunnings instead of braving the grounds of UQ Innovate to glue my box together. The main factors that contributed to this decision were my wariness for going to campus more than necessary and the non-toxic aspect of the glue. I did do some research into the best glues for acrylic, which mainly said acrylics require solvents to chemically bond the acrylic pieces together. For the purpose of this box, which is now nicely adorning the TV unit, I figured that the universal adhesive would be fine.

Work To Do

• Team Meeting (Monday 12PM through Zoom) to discuss concepts and finalise one for the concept proposal in class on Tuesday Session 1 (9:30)
• Team name! and charter (which is 98% complete, just needs signatures)
• Sketch/props to be gathered and brought
• Proposal & critiques of other team concepts

Work That Inspired Me

I first came across this designer through a documentary series on Netflix. Her work inspires me because she puts a lot of effort into making sure kids keep their creativity flowing and imagination growing. I like the way she thinks and how she doesn't just target a specific gender or way of thinking when she designs the toys.