Week 4

As we rolled into the fourth week of semester our group was really getting into gear and beginning to engage the problem on a deeper level.  We were somewhat hindered by the absence of Hamish, he was off at a sailing event and because of this was unable to contribute as much as he doubtlessly would have otherwise.  While Hamish's input is extremely valuable to all group work we were happy to continue on without him for the time being especially since he was afforded such an exciting opportunity.  So this week it was primarily the three of us, Max, Kyle and I, working on the project, bringing our concept and research to a presentable level.

As we had done the bulk of our research last week we were able to move into the other parts of the project.  First up I identified some of the groups in the community who suffer from health inequalities.  I did this so we could see which groups really needed our help and focus on these individuals.  Obviously we are not limited to these groups, as health issues are common within the wider Australian population, no one group has particularly lower rates of them.

Although we had wrapped up most of our research I managed to find an article about designing social problem-solving interventions.  This article was summarised by Max and should prove to be very useful in our efforts to help people with health issues.

We then got to the Wednesday class, which is often our main opportunity to really nut out the problem.  In that class we managed to figure out a range of things.  Primarily we figured out that we would do an exhibition type fixed set up as this avoided the over-saturated markets of apps and products that are common in the health sphere as well as allowing cheap and easy access to people with limited resources.  Obviously there are issues with how to fund it etc but we figured there were multiple avenues on how to approach that particular issue so we’d sort that out once we’d refined the design a bit more.

In the class we also brainstormed aspects such as what we could record in the proposed set up as well as who would be affected by the system.  After the class I broke down what we’d need to do for the rest of the week, primarily nailing down the user profiles and sorting out our ideas, as we’d pretty much covered everything else.

At the end of this week we have a fair few things that need to be sorted for the presentation on Wednesday but I believe we’ll be able to sort out everything by Monday night as we should be in a good place come Wednesday, particularly with the return of Hamish.  Unfortunately on Wednesday we lose max, who is visiting Italy for his sister’s wedding, however hopefully with his involvement in the ideation phase we can avoid most of the negative effects of having him missing.