Life is like photography. You use the negatives to develop!

Departing from these words of widsdom another blogpost commences. Anticipation is over! It is time to inform you about the outcome of our Peer Pitches at MediaLAB and most important of our presentation/meeting with our stakeholders. But before that, there are tasty things that prevailed!

Every Monday one team is responsible to make lunch for everyone working  in MediaLAB. Guess what, this week it was our turn! We are glad that we have a Colombian in our team (Angela), while we had the opportunity to make something unique and “exotic”. Her initial idea was to make an inspired  Latin dish called Burritos Vegetarianos which included tortillas, avocado, paprika, cucumber and the special sauce called Pico De Gallo (tomato, onions, olive oil, lemon and koriander). Along with the tortillas we served nachos and Mexican sauce. The reactions to our lunch were overwhelming and we think that everyone was satisfied (at least thats what they’ve told us). I believe cooking brings people together and exploring cuisines from other cultures is an interesting way to know them better. After this cooking lesson, it is time to get serious (just kidding)!

The Peer Pitches

On our previous blogpost i forgot to mention that this week, except from the meeting with our stakeholders which was on Thrusday. we also had our Peer Pitches on Wednesday. Peer Pitches are a form of presentations used in MediaLAB before the end of every sprint (3 weeks), which includes results, possible protoypes  and is used mainly as a way for the teams to collect feedback from the MediaLAB experts-coaches to move further with their projects and make changes. More precisely it should include:

After every presentation which lasted 10 mintues, every team received questions from other team members and coaches which were divided into teams of expertises including Design, Strategy, Interaction and User. These questions created fruitful discussions which brought about new insights and approaches for every team, valuable for our next sprints which starts next Monday.

As for the team Designing the Experience, we are really happy with the feedback we gained. Everyone enjoyed the fact that we presented a clickable prototype of our application which was combined with paper cubes (designed by Angela) which mirrored the idea of the 3D mapping projection on the physical interface. Through that, it was easier for the audience to understand better our idea while through the use of storytelling we created a story around the use of our product. The questions that followed, especially from Loes Bogers (project manager at MediaLAB), where very beneficial while she highlighted some new research aspects such as: content, evaluation tools, feedback tools, decission making, relevant for us to dive in and explore. Following this, our coach and stakeholder Bernadette Schrandt congratulated us for our presentation and informed us about some things that we should incorporate in our presentation important to our stakeholders along with possible questions that we should be prepared to answer. Thus, you understand that both Tuesday and Wednesday were two days full of preparation, decision making and conversations, which is something that we really enjoy as a team.

Furthermore, as you have realized so far, every week we give a promise to you for our next  blog post (inform you about something new) and of course we  keep it. If you remember the title of last week’s post was “From concept to CONCEPT” (came to foresee the future) which mirrored mainly the stages we passed in order to come up with a concept, with the hope that our stakeholders will like it (while we loved it). Lets see what happened after all.

Curator and Visitors

User Stories and Product Requirements

Evaluation Form_Peer Pitches

The Meeting

Coming from a very good presentation, taking into account and incorporating our coaches recommendations, we entered the room really confident about our concept. However, we  had seconds thoughts about it to be honest and thus we were looking forward to our stakeholders feedback. There we presented in front of our coach Bernadette Schrandt, the Crossmedia professor Harry van Vliet and the researcher Wouter Groot. After presenting our concept and findings so far, it was obvious that a TWIST was ahead of us. The case was not that they did not like our concept or that they rejected it completely, but there were aspects of it that were not suitable for our design process .

Using the title of our project as a stepping stone “Designing the Experience” they made us realize that the two main factors/topics that we need to focus on more are Design and Experience. The following images depict in the best way where our focus will be centered  from now on and which questions we will try to give answer to during our second sprint. The new concept we are assigned to create will be based on physical materials, inspired also from our visit to Play the City two weeks ago, including the principles of co-creation but directing our attention towards the creation of a feedback evaluation tool.

All in all, even if our concept was “rejected” somehow, the smile on our faces after the meeting was an obvious contrast. This was mainly because, first we were proud for what we achieved in the past three weeks (less with workshops, meeting etc.), second that we had a fruitful discussion which brought about new ideas and third that now we are triggered to push ourselvers further and broaden our horizons.

It is Friday today and we think that it is a day that we can relax at work, enjoy the bright sun (something you dont experience that much in Amsterdam) and give us some time during the weekend to think what we want to do from Monday and on, with the beginning of our next Sprint. We will keep you updated of course! Till the next blogpost you can always check our Flick page for visual material.

Concept 2.0

SUN 😀

Thank you for reading!

From Angela, Constantine and Angelo!