After months of hard work the moment was finally there: final presentations at the MediaLAB! Although we were ready to present our stuff, we were a little bit curious what the day would bring.
The presentation went great, and everyone felt the compassion when the Oglow bracelet showed us that another Dutch medal had been won. After the presentation it was time to do the expo, which was visited by people who wanted to know more. You couldn’t miss our stand: everything was orange! We got a lot of questions about the bracelet and our prototypes which we all answered. We were very happy and proud and on Thursday we were still amazed by the succes of the evening.
On Thursday we also visited the Mediapark Jaarcongress, to show our concept to a couple of media business specialists. Jos, our embedded researcher, helped us with this. We got a lot of positive reactions and some helpful feedback.
Today we are going to do a final presentation at TWC to show them what we’ve done all this time. Next week, we are going to do some user research, finish the research paper and then it is already time to say goodbye…. But before that, we first want you to check out our video about our concept: The Oglow!
Last sprint we worked on a new concept that focused on the social part of the Olympics, and how it could unite people. We wanted a concept that would bring the digital world into the real world, instead of information always being in the clouds and only available to individuals, we wanted it to be real, and available to everyone. Our focus was to generate pride, togetherness & influence for the fans. In order to do that we came up with whats currently named the Oglow.
The Oglow is a bracelet that will glow, when certain actions takes place during the Olympics, such as when a Dutch athlete wins a medal or scores a goal etc. It will also indicate how many dutch people is currently watching the Olympics. Certain notification updates will also be available on the Oglow.
After working hard on our concept for a few short weeks, it was time to present it to TWC. We felt quite comfortable about this concept, and we were very nervous about how TWC would feel about it. However they liked the general concept, and had suggestions to how the technical part would work, and how we should continue to develop this project.
This sprint we will focus on developing our concept further, by finishing our user research, user scenarios & producing an improved prototype.
Last Wednesday we had a peer pitch at the MediaLAB, which gave us an opportunity to share our project with the other groups, as well as hearing about their projects and get inspired by some of their ideas and methods.
After presenting our project to our peers and their coaches we got some very good feedback. We have been struggling with narrowing down our project and we have kept all doors open, but maybe it is time to make some decisions, narrow down our project, and focus on one or two concepts using modern technology, not futuristic technology.
The day following the peer presentation we had a workshop with the great Charlie Mulholland, who helped us with idea selection and how to make the right decisions. Once again a very helpful workshop, that resulted in us making some requirements for our concept that will make the decision process easier, and also helped us to decide on one idea we’re going to work on next week.
We also learned that maybe we haven’t focused as much on the user as we should, mostly we have been focusing on which technological inventions we should use, instead of researching what the user need and want. Therefor we have planed to spend a few days where some team members will focus on researching the user.
It was very interesting to get feedback from our peers, as well as hear about their project, and the problems they are facing.
First of all, we moved from the MediaLab to TWC for 3 days a week. It’s nice to have a lot of experts around and apart from having a lot of knowledge and hardware there’s a pool table and some awesome swings.
The last few days everyone started to get a grasp of the project. We had some trouble setting up because of the size of the project and the fact that no one knows what our final product will look like. We have decided on some good research questions and even though the research has barely started the first ideas are already coming to the table. We are all realizing that 2016 is actually closer then we think but there are also more options than we could have imagined.
Our scrum board is finally up and running. We are settled in and our office is starting to look like a real workspace. With the help of some friendly experts the early stage is shaping up to be a good start.
User Scene:
Next week will all be about user interviews and working our way through our sprint backlog.
