“Strangers talking” = Our eloquent Sprint goal.
This past week has been eventful. Although our Sprint goal seems straightforward enough (pictured above), it is not easy-as-pie-cake-whatever-dessert you’re eating right now. We’ve been making communication models, designing maps (yes, more maps) of Amsterdam, having meetings, hijacking Twitter and learning Processing till we’re cross-eyed. Oh, and we met the halfway mark of our Second Sprint – had our Translate session – and sort of re-evaluated our entire idea. Super leuk.
Some of the models Atossa has been developing, wahoo.
One of the key tasks in this sprint was to create separate models related to engagement/ communication/conversation. Atossa, our resident culture and communication expert, is going to do a separate blog post on all of the various models she has been working away at. She’s been converting all of her research into beautiful visuals with Illustrator which is super awesome considering she only started working with the program a few short weeks ago. Kudos, girl.
Fun inspiring design stuff: Map of Amsterdam Oost by Egidius Bink.
Lisanne worked on designing an illustrative map of Amsterdam – mainly focusing on the key landmarks in certain areas – which ultimately reminded Nikhil of Pokemon. Which is, you know, a designer’s dream. Check out this tweet for a sneak peak of what it looks like.
Fresh off the Volkshotel’s Instagram page: Love in Cyberspace. Who isn’t interested?
Atossa and Orly met with Janneke of the Volkshotel to discuss how she handles their PR & Communications. They discovered that for the Volkshotel, engagement is defined by the meetings and conversations that people have either while they are physically in the Volkshotel or digitally through social media (with Instagram being their most favoured). They also learned that the Volkshotel had an event called ‘Complaining with Noel Loozen’ (see the video here), where people were allowed to complain 24 hours straight to another person (#livingthedream). Through this, they received a lot of press coverage and began to redefine the way that the Volkshotel is seen: not just as a hotel, but also as an experimental space.
Bromance.
Orly and Nikhil have been busy understanding and designing the different layers of content generation for the screens, i.e., designing a meaningful manner of extraction of available content (such as the archived footage from the Sound and Vision Institute). They’ve also been finding context from the available data (both Big Data and Social Media) in order to monitor relevant content that will trigger interest in the viewers. Also, more emphasis has also been made on visualizing the content and data in creative through software like Processing and OpenFrameworks. Translation? They work hard. They work really hard.
Q: When do strangers actually talk to each other? A: In a lot of surprising, and awkward, situations.
We had our Sprint Review session on Wednesday sans Gijs – we missed him loads – which went well. Shreya designed a snazzy presentation, and we dragged Felipe along because his insights are really invaluable (read: always on point. He is the one who instigated the brainstorming session pictured above). After learning what our fellow comrades are up to, and getting some suggestions on how to push our project further, we had a fiery brainstorming session which resulted in us changing our idea. It seemed like the logical thing to do… #yolo? Instead of our looking solely at social media and archived footage to produce visuals on-screen, we thought it would make more sense to consider things like the relationship between the sound of the environment (that the screen is located in) and the visuals on-screen.
Getting all cozy. Finally reunited.
When Gijs finally came back, we got the chance to tell him what we have been doing, and the reasoning behind our shift in idea. Ultimately, he brought us back down to earth and we’re back following the same initial idea we were working towards to begin with. #rollercoasterofemotions. Lesson learned? Don’t. Change. A. Sprint. Halfway. Through. No matter how unbelievably awesome your ideas seem. Interactive Screen Team Out.
