It was a busy week with two workshops, the start of Sprint#1, our first working days at the Amnesty office and three interviews.
What’s the problem?
We started this week with a workshop Problem Definition from the hyper active Charlie Mulholland. This workshop gave us different perspectives on the problem we are trying to solve and some interesting insights.
Design brief and sprintplanning
We got organised this week! Although we of course love our wooden scrumboard we use for our sprint planning, we now also love our digital sprint planning. Lisa made a nice colourful overview of the planning of these three weeks with all the tasks. We put a picture of it on this blog just because we’re proud of it! Rado also started with the design brief, which will be finished the end of this sprint.
Tinker around
Loes and Tamara from MediaLAB prepared a workshop about tinkering and prototyping which allowed us to let go of all the practical stuff and just explore and experiment.
Tinkering is about hands-on experiences, learning from failures, and unstructured time to explore and invent. And through the processes of exploration and invention lies the potential for innovation. (Tinkerlab.com)
A prototype is a first or preliminary model of something from which other forms are developed or copied.
We came to the conclusion that tinkering and prototyping have some things in common, mainly that failure is good. By means of trying stuff and also failing you will quickly find out what works and what doesn’t.
In one hour we had to create a paper prototype of something that could be a part of our project and test it with someone from another team. We came up with a prototype for an experience in a museum where you, by choosing your favourite color, would be literally put into a “box”. The choice of your color had effect on what room you could go to. In this room you would find certain prejudices about the color that you chose.
In the second part of the workshop we all could play around with tinker materials. Our table was lucky to get MakeyMakey. With MakeyMakey you can connect the keyboard of your computer to almost anything you want, transforming these objects into buttons. (Here you can check out some cool stuff you can do with MakeyMakey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQqh7iCcOU)
MakeyMakey is very easy to use, even if you don’t understand the technical side of it. This led to a lot of fun. In the video below you can see how we used MakeyMakey to transform ourselves into the keys of a piano!
MakeyMakey
Amnesty office
The best part of this week was working at the Amnesty office where we were welcomed with open arms. In these two days we had three work places (four, if you count the garden) and three meetings with people from Amnesty. We talked to Juke Fluitsma and Suzanne Fennema from the education departement and Maarten Beckers from the action departement. We got a lot of useful information from them.
Also it has to be said that lunchtime is one of the highlights at the office. Everyday a lovely lady prepares something else. The garden of Amnesty provides a perfect place to enjoy this tasty lunch.
