Week 5 - Poster and Pitch Reflections

Change of Ideas:

A number of things have occurred this week in terms of the progress of the project. First of all, the team has decided based on last week’s feedback and analysis to go with the concept Guesstoric: an interactive guessing game for historical monuments. This idea is a combination of two concepts: Guesstoric and Guesstimate (found on the concept cards). It takes the monument guessing component from Guesstoric, and the blurry-to-clear image component from Guesstimate to create an educational and interactive guessing game.

The idea is to allow school students/other interested parties to learn more about the historical significance surrounding the monuments situated throughout cities all over the world. It will use images and text from Trove to create both an educational and fun experience for the user. Learning history should not be boring, and with the technology and information available at our fingertips now there can be a more interactive and engaging way to learn. This is what Guesstoric aims to achieve.

The Pitch and Poster:

Creating the poster and pitching the concept to the rest of the class was a great way to get a feel of pitching and communicating ideas to other people, and it forces us to really understand the product we are building, and why it is unique.

During our pitch, we went through how the system works, who it’s target audience is, why it is unique and what the benefits of the app are by walking through a storyboard/scenario. In hindsight, this should have been rehearsed more and cut down to only include the most important and attention-grabbing parts. The posters designed can be seen below:

Guesstoric Poster - designed by me (bigger image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzY5tywhuJqrVllWNEIyd3pNd3M/view?usp=sharing)

Infographic designed by Felipe (bigger image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1B_VmPtrUuFamhQM1lKUTZ1NW8/view?usp=sharing)

Overall I feel that the team has worked together reasonably well and we are making good progress with the project despite the last minute change of ideas. Some minor issues that arose during the making of the pitch and poster: I hadn’t realised that Felipe had already created a poster, and so this resulted in two different posters on the day. In the end, we used both posters which actually worked quite well - one poster was used to describe the concept and the other used as another visual aid to further communicate the benefits/features of the app. This redundancy however could have been avoided through better and more frequent communication within the team.

This coming week we plan to work on the concept document and plan how the concept will be implemented.

Week 4

In this week’s contact session, the team discussed our availability in order to set a time for weekly team meetings. This was done in a google sheets document, so each of us can easily collaborate on it and see a visual representation of when people are available/busy

Sorting out team availability

In terms of the individual concepts that each of us contributed, it was decided to further analyse HistoriFinder as a team, for potential weak and strong points. This was done through the coloured hat system. It was also advised not to tear down ideas too much, and to look at them with balanced perspectives. That is why the coloured hat system works well to take on different perspectives of an idea and make sure it isn’t being criticised too much through one perspective. The notes from this session can be found below:

White - Facts

• Data pulled from Trove about location may not be accurate or relevant

Yellow - Benefits

• It is educational - people can learn about the historical events that occurred around the city they live in
• There is an element of fun
• It can be beneficial for tourism

Black - Cautions

• Difficult to pinpoint exact location (technology was scarcely available back then, hard to document exact longitude and longitude of certain events)
• Difficult to implement - would have to deal with GPS and mobile development as well as Trove

Green - Creativity

• Perhaps if an exact location can not be pinpointed, the app could allow users to deduce the location based on photos
• Could use augmented reality technology to view surroundings as it were in older times through the phone camera (patching together old photographs and viewing them similar to Street View in Google Maps)

Red - Feelings

• Can potentially revolutionise how users view the city around them, and reconnect them with its historical past
• There are a lot of technical things involved and this might be out of the scope of this project

There was also some feedback/criticism received from the tutors surrounding this idea. HistoriFinder should not just become a search engine, and the information retrieved from Trove should be more focused - e.g churches, libraries etc - rather than the broad category of places where historical events have occurred. The project should also be a web application, and HistoriFinder had been designed to be a mobile application through its GPS functionality and portability.

The plan for the following week is to refine the project idea and work on the poster and pitch. After hearing the tutor’s feedback and analysing the idea more comprehensively, the team will need to rethink whether it will be feasible to implement such an idea given the time constraints and skills available.

Week 3 - Team Work Module

Team Work Module:

Undertaking the teamwork module has allowed me to better reflect upon our newly formed team and how to function effectively as a team throughout the project. I feel it helped me to understand what makes a team effective and how I can apply some of these strategies to our own team. Namely, I learned the difference between groups and teams, and that successful teams collaborate and help one another on their tasks. I believe as a team we should endeavour to help each other where we see fit, and take on roles proactively rather than working individually on our own tasks. In terms of the team lifecycle, I feel it is important to establish objectives and strong operation/communication rules early on. This will ensure everyone is on the same page, and it can better facilitate the work that each team member contributes throughout the semester.

Communication will also be key to the success of the team project. Everyone needs to be on board with what’s going on and what needs to be done, so on top of contact sessions, extra meetings and online communication will be needed. For me I think the biggest challenge is to be able to split tasks evenly and delegate the work equally and based on what skills each team member offers to the project. In order to combat this, the whole team will need to be involved in task delegation and be able to contribute what their preferred roles are, what they are more capable of, what their concerns are etc.

Week’s Progress:

This week was also spent on more brainstorming ideas for the project. In the contact, we went around the class and discussed possible ideas/project directions for different categories i.e educational, games etc. It was interesting to hear the different ideas everyone else were suggesting, and all the different uses you can make out of Trove.

My HistoriFinder idea fit under Other (Location-based historical timeline)

Me, and 4 other of my teammates have settled into our project team ‘Tribu’ and the coming week will involve working towards the team charter, and through this we will pool all our ideas together and come up with our favourite 3 concepts.

Sketch of HistoriFinder for concept cards

There weren’t too many major issues that needed to be overcome this week - mostly brainstorming for ideas and settling in as a team. Each team member discussed their own skills and experience in order to decide which roles and responsibilities they could fulfil towards the project i.e design, development, user testing etc. Overall I feel there are some interesting ideas the team has come up already and the next challenge is to decide which direction to take.

Week 1/2

// Questions

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be working collaboratively in a group to produce an interactive product that will extract data from an external server (i.e Trove). More generally, I expect to pick up new technical skills, improve my creative thinking and actively participate and engage myself in studio-based learning.

I would like to learn technical aspects associated with the project such as using languages/tools like JSON, JavaScript etc so that I can apply this knowledge to future projects that require the similar function of extracting data from an external server. I want to experience the design process - from ideation to testing, improve my creative thinking and learn from any mistakes made throughout the semester.

My primary worries are feeling lost in the technical aspects of the projects, as well as being part of a team whom may not feel as motivated as I am. These can be resolved however by asking questions (i.e to the tutors) or self-learning when necessary, and speaking openly to the other team members and ensuring we are all on the same page and understand each others’ goals for the course.

I hope that I can come out of DECO1800 a better designer, developer, creative thinker and team worker. 

// Contact

During the first contact session, two others and I came up with some interesting ideas for the project. One idea was an interactive learning game for children about the history of trains in Australia. Basically the user would hop on a train which would take them to different ‘Time Stations’ (e.g 1890’s, 1940’s etc). The train design itself would evolve according to the time frame it is in, and at each station, the user will learn about the trains at that time and play a mini-game relating to it.

Another idea one of the others came up with was similar to the first idea in that it is an interactive learning tool aimed at children, however instead of trains it teaches children about programming. The questions/activities would stem from some of the programming resources (textbooks, articles etc) on Trove.

An idea I came up with, is a mobile application that notifies the user if they are standing anywhere in Brisbane where a historical event had once taken place. For instance, say the user walks into Central Station when suddenly they get a notification on their phone. The user checks it to discover (so many years ago) what it looked like when it was just being built, through photos, perhaps a video, and accompanying text. In order for this to work, however, the app would need to be able to extract historical events and their locations from the records in Trove. Going through each record would obviously be too tedious, and so some sort of autonomous program would need to be built for that. GPS would also have to be taken into consideration. In general, the concept could be very effective, however implementing the technical aspects may be very time-consuming, complicated and outside the scope of this course. 

Our ideas

A news article on Trove dating back to the 1883. Could be useful for the GPS historical app.