Week 6

Week 6 has been one of the group’s quietest weeks so far.  The whole team deserved a bit of a break after the excellent work they all did with the presentation.  Max decided to take his break to the next level by going to Italy, an impressive effort from him proving once again why he’s such a valuable group member, he really goes above and beyond.

The group was recovering and reassessing our position after the presentations, making sure that we knew where we were and what we were doing before we made our next move.  There was some discussion on the group’s Facebook about how we would address the issue with user groups, our original ones failing to inspire our creative process.  However this didn’t really lead anywhere and was more or less abandoned at the beginning of the week.

All in all very little was done until Wednesday, I failed to push for more work to be done as I was, as most members of the group were, focusing a bit more on my other studies and, to be perfectly honest, at a bit of a loss on where to go from there and how to solve the problems that faced the group.  For that reason I allowed the discussions to slide until our class on Wednesday where we could talk in person and hopefully come to a good solution that would suit the group and design problem better.

Unfortunately on Wednesday Kyle was unable to make it to class which meant it was just Hamish and I.  Fortunately this didn’t really matter as most of our problems were solved when we got feedback on our presentations.  As far as communication and research quality went the results were extremely positive which is great, I stressed to the group he importance of these two marking criteria, encouraging the use of research throughout the presentation and the use of images etc to help better communicate our ideas, and the group all responded well to this, finding and creating images and managing to cite a wide range of reliable sources.

On the other side, however, the other two marking criteria, concept and development quality and technical and creative proficiency and solution quality weren’t quite as strong.  Unfortunately I’m still not aware of how well we did in these areas but hopefully it isn’t too bad and doesn’t bring us down from our outstanding effort on the first half.  I feel a great deal of personal responsibility for this discrepancy in our marks. 

I didn’t push these marking criteria as hard as I did the others, I managed to tunnel vision on the communication and research quality.  This is partially because I, wrongly, perceived these to mostly be out of my hands since I wasn’t directly involved with these aspects.  In hindsight I had a lot of say in these areas since I was able to review them and work with the appropriate team member to make sure that the criteria was met.

One of the key problems with our initial presentation is that we didn’t make our actual idea clear enough.  I’m not sure quite why there was this misunderstanding but I think it was partially a failure on our part to put enough emphasis on our final idea and explain it properly. Once I’d suggested that the testing system could be leveraged in Centrelink offices and hospitals etc (an idea I suggested briefly in the group but failed to properly expand upon) the idea seemed to gain a lot more traction.

The upside of this whole process is that we are able to follow through with our original core idea.  This core idea is also able to be augmented with the addition of advertising which was another of our ideas which went over very well with the markers.

On Thursday, after reflecting on where we were going after getting feedback, and making an attempt to break down our next steps, I assigned tasks to the group members, in order to get them moving on and working on something worthwhile.

To Hamish, our industrial designer, I assigned the task of doing some research into how we are going to do the physical aspects of this project. To Max (and he won’t have much time for this as he only gets back today (Sunday)) I assigned the task of looking into potential UI designs for the final set up.  For Kyle, and I discussed this with him on Thursday, we agreed he do technical research, figuring out what components we’d need for him to program the final product.

As for myself, I’m working on the advertising side of the project, assessing the viability of designing tie-in adverts and seeing the best ways of communicating health information.  I’ve been looking at several scholarly articles and books about how to advertise effectively, particularly health information and it looks like there is a lot we could do that would work well with the rest of the design.

Hopefully next week the whole team gets into gear as we will all be back in Sydney and working on the project.