#6 Look and Feel

The ideal plan and process of the project development according to the Gantt Chart planned should arrive at the stage of technical production and design production happen concurrently. But we are slightly behind schedule.

I starts to struggle.

There's two side of me that is struggling at different things.

As a learner:
I have other assignments on the way and those assignments are taking much time. I have to effectively plan, day after another, one assignment after another. Every day in the week are dedicated for different assignment. But I'm still behind time.

TWP is a team work process. It involves many discussion and have to come to an agreement. There's no point for us to do things differently and disagree, disconnected to rushing things through. In addition to that, I have group members that are very slow in decision making, inexperience in interactive project process and estimation of project working hour. Many things that we do, my team members have to ask for opinion. Meanwhile, we have punctuality issues. Sometimes, the meeting will delay for at most 2 hours plus. There are also times that team members come together but not focus in the tasks given, easily stray away to chit-chat and checking mobile... The toughest thing in this team work is that they're few times the 2 team members cannot effectively communicate and almost fight. These unstable atmosphere affected the flow of the teamwork. As a team leader, other than the busy production schedule, I also need to keep everyone in the team in the same focus of production, not affect by emotion. I was at once almost fall into the emotional wave in the team.

Besides that, the design production needs many round of improvement. I, personally am not happy with the design outcome, the design lead is struggling with the direction and has no idea how to improve. The initiative of research and problem solving skill is rather low and passive. I faced challenge in convincing the leader to enhance the work. So instead of relying the department leader to handle the department, I need to spend time to manage the department leader. So I can't imagine how Agile working method can be applied in this scenario. At the same time my tutor are requiring us to do so.

The vending machine head, Sue Min is working very hard to measure and calculate the architecture of our vending machine. She's very precise, detail oriented. And we got confirmation from MT that she's willing to borrow us her home TV. So we might be slow, but things are falling in place with the work that we need to do.

Technical research throughout the week has hints me that I can't rely normal webcam to execute the interactivity of measuring human posture. The most possible and workable script research I got, are the capturing and storing photos taken from webcam. No significant measurement is working as how we wanted it.

So I have to change the technology to Kinect. As only Kinect allows webcam measure human body joints to allow measuring user posture while interacting with our vending machine. So happened that other groups are changing their ideas at this point and we got spare Kinect to use. So I decided to move on to using Kinect as our main interactive technology.

Worry: We gonna have a CNY break, and we just got the equipments this week, the decision of changing technology is just made, (which means I have no time to try it out as school close and I'm not around), and right after the break I need to show alpha of the project.



As a teacher:
I start to question the practicality of the project design and it's expectation and requirement. Because all my classmates are just high school graduates, with their limited exposure of media and technology, with the equal amount of works needed in other assignments, how can they handle it? I am a teacher and I'm very familiar with the design and interactive production flow, yet I felt it hard to achieve the expectation, and requirement my tutor demand. In my emotional thoughts, I asked, "as much as lecturer are demanding us to do user test in our product design, to see how user interact with it, didn't our lecturer conduct any user test to understand their course/ project brief to understand how their user (students) went through the learning experience?

Of course in this case, I did my part. I make myself remember the importance of doing user test to understand how my students learn and manage my expectation of students project outcome to gage their capability and their time availability so to give them a more encouraging learning environment.

#5 Catching up with timeline

Finally we got our video done.

Flashback:
After few weeks of discussion with the team, I realized that we can't make all decision based on many round of discussion. We do not have the luxury of time. Once the overall idea is fixed, the rest is easier. With all the members being team worker character, it's also important for me to set direction so that everyone could focus on the tasks and no delay on the timeline.

To complete the video in one week time is indeed a challenge. But I think I can handle it. The most important thing to do is to distribute tasks, get everyone working in parts so that we could bring together the video footages and compile into a 3 minutes long documentary.

After showing the references with the team, Evon spend good amount of time to analyse the video sample so that we could later create something similar.

We planned the content that we gonna insert into the video documentary, then we plan for a shooting day and film the video footages that help enrich the project ideas.

We work out the overall flow of how the video content will be, then distribute the tasks for each one of us to do. So MT remain working on the UI design and aim to complete an overall flow of the visual experience, Evon in charge of finding more exercise content and graphic to complete the theme research, and Sue Min working on building prototype dispenser system. And I myself have to start gathering webcam scripts that work exactly like how we proposed. To have codes that detect camera visual, user movement, and measure user's movement so to create the complete "Flex-o-matic" experience.

#4 Take the Challenges - Project Direction and Video Documentation

This is TWP week 9.
During the study break, we had struggled through team forming. Came back from the study break, I've managed to get some other assignments in other module started. Time wasn't enough.

Week before this, we proposed our idea of vending machine to tutor Jazmi. We got the idea of identity theft vending machine, allowing user to see the impact of how online identity or online information could be stolen and through dynamic content presentation integrating with user's facebook account, we wanted to create a customizable interactive experience for user to see how users' online info could be sold for advertising targeting company to flood our social media with advertisement.

This idea got rejected. Although we are very happy about it, and I'm sure that I could work on the Facebook API and webcam features using flash and web technology, yet, we got comment that the interactivity wasn't complete.

We were given direction that if we want to work on Vending Machine, we need to explore the nature of vending machine. What makes the media so unique in its context? Our group had been through so far to come to an agreement of working on the Vending Machine media, even measured and analyze the architecture of it so to make sure that whatever we proposed is workable for us to complete.

research archive of vending machine

So we stick to the idea, and research deeper into vending machine. We had a few rounds of online meeting sharing ideas and thoughts among ourselves so to figure out a better reason of using vending machine. At the end, we come to an agreement to set the issue and direction of vending machine to the idea we had till the end, the vending machine that gives user a quick getaway from their busy schedule and help increase their health awareness of sitting in front of computer for too long.

We have no time to waste, as the following week we need to get the video documentation done. No matter the idea works or not, there's no more time to think.

#3 Negotiation Skills and Team Work Skills

It wasn't easy at all, with the pressure of tight timeline one after another that gives no breaks in between. The pressure within the team, the challenge to get everyone agree in the project direction and the pressure from the brief, completing the work with the limited timeline do make me feel stress.

When the team discussed about the project direction, we have our very own interpretation of what it means to be a good idea. No matter in terms if the choice of media, the choice of visual experience, and the choice of theme. We are all very critical in how the final outcome of the project communicates our idea. So I have to change my strategy from discussing the media direction to discussing the issue behind our project. Maybe letting the issue solidify our approach of creating the media product it will help us to share the vision clearer and better.

After lots of research and reading as my previous post has displayed, most of us agreed to work on Vending Machine kind of media solution with the issue hanging, uncertain.

We explore our ideas by thinking through the process and technicality without too much compromising of the excitement we wanted to maintain in the journey of exploring the media artifact.

Most of our ideas are sketched out, explored, critically argued, and then thrown away when not all agreed in the idea. We are still not very happy at the idea. So we do some more research and discussion. 

Ad most of the direction and suggestions are from me, the other members are acting passively, not having much understanding about what I've proposed, I have to make the tasks assigned even more specific. Instead of asking the members to research for direction, I requested everyone to specifically perform tasks as below: 

Then, everyone also very corporative in performing the tasks given. Though some of the members needs very specific explanation and clarification, but we manage to get everyone's input to then re-organize ourselves again.

#2 Norming - Always cordinate so to come to an agreement

With my working schedule and the other assignments in consideration, I really need to plan ahead of all the events and progress. Plus my moving house schedule falls on the Christmas and New Year holiday season, I planned all the team work schedule and study the project brief and timeline very carefully.

I came out with the teamwork style and direction at the 2nd week after the team formed. By doing this, I hope to let the members know the time resources that we had in the coming weeks. Hopefully through this pre-informed timeline, we can get the working pace increase a little bit.

When I present an A3 size Gantt Chart (printed out in colour) or project timeline following the suggested progress listed in the brief, all 3 members of the team got shock and didn't aware about it.

Every student wants to perform, wants to create work that make them feel proud, wants to reflect their skills in the project that they gonna spend longer time in the future. So we put in a lot of effort in setting our project direction.

But before we can come to the direction, we need to sync our understanding about each others' media preference, idea thinking methods, research methods and communication style. We manage to come to an understanding of each other from listing our research in our facebook group so to allow everyone freely express their interest, their preference and their opinions.

As we have individually very unique taste towards media art, below are some compilation to see the kind of various direction we need to listen to, and then organize and bring it all to one agreeable direction before we can further move on.

#1 Group formed - Group forming and synchronizing process

We are all very excited anxious about the new grouping. Semester C has gave us all an overall understanding about each other's working style and preference. Before lucky draw decide out team member, the whole class sweat their way out to the end.

My group consists of 4 ladies, Sue Min, Evon, Mt and myself.

Once we got the group in class, we quickly meet up to form the basic structure of the group - Design Lead, Content Lead, Logistic Lead and Technical Lead. It's also the time we try to get to know once other a little better by understanding each others' MBTI and Belbin's Team Role.

In short, we have 3 team workers and 1 manager and resource investigator combination in this group. It's quite challenging for me to work in this group. My understanding of one another prior to the team work we are going to start might gives me some worries. After thinking very hard, I thought of understanding each other better by conditioning this group to be an honest and free-to-speak style of group culture. No matter what impression we had toward each other, we want to work by understanding each other's concern in order to avoid unnecessary conflict or misunderstanding in the future.

Below are things that we mentioned as what we try to avoid in our group work.

Since we have most of the team worker, and each of us are having very unique way of understanding the project and coming out with ideas, we went through many many many round of meetings before we come to a conclusion.

Most of the time at this stage, I am feeling a little worry and exciting at the same time. Reason because I've learnt from the previous group project the strength and weaknesses of the team leader. Those are also reflection that makes me look into myself, and I realized that I don't have some of the quality my previous leader had. 

But I am exciting as I am really looking forward to see how can our group have fun with such and artsy and experimental project compared to all the boring and restricted interactive brief. Since the main reference we have, website that called Body>Data>Space leave us such a wide room to explore the scope of project, we really want to get the most out of such fun brief.