I tried very hard to manage the team work to get everything done as well as we could. But my team members seemed to be at their lowest productivity mode. Rushing through their Essay, and the past few weeks of sleepless night working on this project and other assignments has affected their brain working speed. We're at our lowest point of productivity. I'm very guilty of not able to give the team a complete interactive product. But with the limited resources and time, I manage to work out a finger gesture controlled ui plus a separate skeleton detection hole-in-the-wall game ui.
Most of the primary functions are working fine. Sound and instruction are included this time. I felt that I have not failed completing the tasks in such project timeline. While we working on furnishing the exterior looks of the vending machine, I'm working on the final testing and interactive setup of the machine. While I am adding in the final set of animation slides into the Processing program, the software crashed at the final 2 hours before the presentation.
My face got pale. All the files couldn't work at all. I restart my computer, reinstall the program, controlling my anxiety, take away those slides and maintain the software capability so that the overall product could still work fine in the presentation. I almost break down, but I know that I need to be professional, and responsible to the team. So finally things work out well again.
I learnt one great lesson from this technical production. I've looked at the new media (Kinect) in an old way. Instead of making the interactivity starting from instruction to game to calculate scores to restart the game, the flash way of thinking Processing and Kinect, I think Processing is used for one single experience that explore interactivity and visual generation of data.
With the cover design of the program it actually signify that the program does more of the data visualizing display and calculation. But because this software has got many libraries that enable Kinect functions and it still stands between the knowledge of Designer and Programmer, so I adopted the technology.
If I were to explore Kinect the next time, I'll be looking at it from a different point of view. Just like how, one of the assessors today said, it could be a no-brainer game that keeps user interacting with the artifacts, it doesn't even need to be a complete interactive circle.
Of course, the requirement of the complete interactive circle comes from the tutors consultation. When the actual capability of media is not well-explored, but we have to meet tutors' expectation of project outcome and there's no enough time and technical skills, students could easily went off track from their project. And it will come to a point when students do not know whether they should listen to their tutors' advice or to remain at their stand so to be responsible to the ability to finish his or her work.
At this point, I felt that my team work with my classmates, the group members are fine. But I have a broken link of teamwork between the team leader and the module tutor in this particular project instances.
And because of the frustration of misunderstanding of learning direction and uncertainty of whether I have learnt what I needs to learn, I have another round of bigger emotional break down. As I cannot figure out why if a student has try very hard in working his/her project out, the project outcome still seem unfinished and insignificant to the tutors. Maybe because the focus of this project became aiming to place it in Publika for exhibition, the requirement from the tutors became more than just a learning process. It's also a product building assignment that you need to complete the product. The concern is the project must be completed, no matter you learnt or not.
Facing my own failure, with things that is unclearly delivered to me, or too much of guessing in what tutors are concern in our group, I have 2 days breakdown after the live event. But after some careful thoughts, I decided to move on and make the final product finishing better so that our team could still show the overall outcome in a complete way.
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