Our first sprint has come and gone. It’s been a real journey (yes, life changing) and it’s hard to believe we’ve got five more to go. It was an intense start to the week – we got kicked out of the lab the night before our peer pitch – but we’ve made loads of progress in terms of prototyping, literature, surveys and meetings.
First slide of our presentation. Yes we are teases.
On Tuesday we pushed ourselves through the night to get our first official working prototype. Lisanne designed, Shreya CSS’d and Nikhil and Orlando coded. Result? An animation that is activated whenever someone includes #Volkshotel in a tweet. It’s a small piece of the ginormous 3D 80 story puzzle of a project we’re working on, but it’s an awesome foundation to build upon.
Apple “Bookshelf” = skeuomorphism
Atossa and Orlando have been busying working on our research paper, and their thoughts have been focused on – along other things – remediation and skeuomorphism (which is a design style that features an element from an earlier period that has now lost its function). You can read more about skeumorphism here.
Survey results.
Atossa and Shreya got some intell on the VolksHotel, OBA Linneaustraat and the screens at OBA Linneaustraat through surveys. They asked passerbys on the streets to fill out questionnaires in order to see their familiarity with these spaces and how they have experienced them. Atossa stood on the streets for hours in the freezing Dutch wind and may have gotten a bit sick as a result. Seriously, this girl is dedicated. Team member of the week.
Crazy tunnel we walked through to get to the Sound and Vision building.
We had our first meeting with the Sound and Vision Institute, which we had to travel to Hilversum to get to (=fun sleepy train rides). We heard about what content they have to offer our project (from videos of Dutch wildlife to retro infomercials about phone televisions to sound clips from the 1900’s), and what kind of projects they’ve been working on to date. It was really inspiring.
We also met with Daan, a MediaLab graduate, Masters student at Delft and an employee of Ngage Media. He told us about the projects he has been working on and showed us a bunch of cool work, such as National Geographic’s augmented reality project in Rotterdam CS. #wacky
Seeing our work displayed at the Volkshotel for the first time. Wild.
We gave our very first peer pitch on Wednesday, which went well, more or less (read: we talk, a lot. A lot. Editing ourselves must be worked on. Killing our babies and all that). We also met with the VolksHotel to pitch them our first idea. They gave us a lot of insights and things to think about as we jump headfirst into the next sprint on Monday, such as ideas revolving around early adaptors, gentrification of Amsterdam and ways to get people to talk to each other in larger cities. So much.
So much passion. So many strange conversations.
Our retrospective – reflecting upon how our sprint went – was also filled with ideas, but more on the how-to-better-orient-ourselves-so-we-don’t-stay-in-the-studio-til-we-get-kicked-out side of things. A.k.a, our team is highly creative, but we need to balance that with structure. We got this. We think.
Our team mascot.
At the end of the day, we’ve sprint, sprant and sprunt our way into the beginnings of what we know will be something amazing. And we couldn’t be more excited to keep learning, growing and pushing this project to the next level. Interactivecontentforthewin.