Week 5

This week was a packed one with lots of work to do for all members of the group, especially with Hamish returning from his sailing regatta on a high (and possibly slightly fatigued) from his win at the event. We were all working on our concept and presentation in order to get it to be the best we could for Wednesday. 

Hamish immediately asked to be filled in on where we were and to be given something to do so I told him where we were at and asked him to start working on the user profiles, a solid grounding with these would ensure our design was as effective as possible so it was really great to have Hamish putting all of his effort into getting that right.

Meanwhile Kyle was working on Design problem, making sure we were thorough with our research and had really made sure knew what we were dealing with.  Kyle managed to find some great stats and additional information which meant we put together a well-rounded design problem that looked at the problem accurately and in detail.

Max was working on the actual design solutions and did an excellent job at it, especially considering he was wrapping up lots of other work and packing before his trip to Italy, shortly after we presented.  Max really went the extra mile with the ideas, making sure they were well rounded and well thought out, putting in the extra time to make sure they were polished and included sketches to illustrate the points we were putting across.

One of our design solutions, a poster

I was working on the introduction and trying to help out on the other sections, especially making sure they hit the marking criteria. It was a bit of a struggle for us in some parts to include research as well as much as I was pushing for but the team really responded and I think we managed to work together hit not only that but all of the marking criteria, leading to a solid presentation.  My only real regret is that at the more intensive moments of the creation of the presentation I was at work so wasn’t able to contribute quite as much as I might have liked.  That being said it was probably for the best as it allowed each team member to do their own work without my (well intentioned) interference.

Once we had finished the presentation, which, I will admit, went to the last minute rather, despite us doing the bulk of the work well before the due date, we did the actual presentation.  Overall I believe this presentation went well.  I was more nervous speaking than I expected to be which was frustrated and unfortunately led to me rambling slightly part way through my part which resulted in Max, who was suffering from his own nerves, to move the presentation along.  While this was slightly frustrating, since I had not quite prefaced what each team member had contributed to the assignment, it did in fact let the whole presentation flow better as we got into the important information far faster than we would have otherwise, the information I would have covered is hopefully covered fully in this blog.

A design solution featuring a game which is effected by the user's BMI

The feedback we got for our ideas was mostly positive, the key part being that we needed to hone in on our chosen user group(s) to ensure we had the freedom to come up with a fun and dynamic design.  We also really need to hammer down and workshop the concept.

After the presentation we had to finish our write up of the report.  Fortunately for Kyle and I who were assembling it most of the notes on the actual presentation were comprehensive and well written which meant we could just use them with a few modifications to ensure the flow of the piece.  This meant that the report was both easy to write and true as possible to the presentation.  Unfortunately we had to cut some parts due to the 1000 word limit however all the important parts were maintained.

Another Poster concept

The last task I set to this week was getting the user group sorted out.  With Max gone this task is up to Kyle, Hamish and I.  Kyle suggested younger teenagers/children with the theory that preventing bad health at this age would help prevent a lot of the accumulative costs and burdens of bad health.  Hamish also added that this would allow us to make the idea more interesting and fun.  I agreed with them at the time and thought that it was a great idea however I have since realised that targeting this group could have some serious ethical and legal hurdles which could actually prove to constrain the design rather than give it freedom.  Working with children is obviously tightly controlled and is probably something we want to avoid at this point.

Unfortunately the falling through of that idea means that we don’t really have a core user group at the moment.   This coming week we’re going to do even more work on that particular problem and hopefully we can all put our heads together and work out exactly what we want to do.  I’m really keen to get the team working on the actual problem but getting a great user group at this idea could mean the difference between a good and great design so is worthy of solid thought.