Thursday, August 30, 2018
Theme: Prototyping
What a day! If I’m being honest, I didn’t start with me best foot forward. I let my tiredness get the best of me in the morning, and I didn’t prepare as well for today. Usually I prepare everything for the next day the night before. I get my lunch ready, pick out my clothes, organize my packsac. But yesterday night I didn’t, and I definitely regretted not following my usual routine because I didn’t manage my time efficiently.
Other than a slightly rocky start, today was a rollercoaster from start to finish. Thank you AnneMarie for the circle debriefs, those really are helpful for restating the goals of the day, as well as reviewing the useful aspects of the readings before going on with the day. Anyhow, it was pretty crazy getting right into prototyping today. We had to finalize what our “Small Experiment With Radical Intent” was going to look like, and I think a few times we let the big picture get clouded.
In the end we made a hilarious looking sensor prototype, as well as working towards an app on INvision. We did hit a speed bump with that because of our photo resolution, and so we moved our idea to a wix website, and it looks pretty spiffy.
Once again, thank you AnneMarie, it was very helpful for the dialogue we had today where we showed you what our innovation looked like, and you helped us put it into words such as “a community hive of information” and, “a digital communal space”. Having someone tell you what you know in a different way helped me envision our prototype more clearly.
I know today’s theme was prototyping, but this will be a side note about all of the themes of the week. Denis Onen shared a quote with us today by Barry Wylant of EVDS, “Design challenge is to make sense of things before they even exist.” That quote really stuck out to me, because it really outlines what we’ve been doing in our sprint.
Ok, back to prototyping. Let’s talk about our marshmallow boats. The explicit and implicit details were really cool to hear about because I never thought about how much you need to infer from the information given to you when completing a task. We all thought ‘boats’ meant one thing, and had that idea stuck in our heads. Also… Ivan and I started ideating without identifying the problem, and so once it came down to individually coming up with design ideas, our design were the same, and we didn’t really want to kill our idea baby. In the end, I’d say, we learned from our mistake. Ivan said, “it’s funny how the simplest design was the most functional.” We let our complex ideas of the challenge get in the way of the simple tasks.
One last little note to conclude this reflection, sitting outside for the last debrief of the day was beautifully refreshing. It was a stressful day, and it felt good to be in the sun, and hear about the exciting day we are going to have tomorrow.