What. A. Week. The last stretch of any sprint is very doggone exhausting. Beyond doing user testing, finishing our presentation, and actually presenting to our peers and stakeholders, we travelled to Eindhoven to learn how to hack projectors and to check out the wicked awesome STRP biennale that’s currently on. Kablamo.
A representation of Paradiso and the Rijksmuseum, alongside archived footage from the Sound and Vision Institute.
At the beginning of our sprint, we decided that we wanted to put a lot more emphasis on user testing. So, on Tuesday we headed over to the Volkshotel to project our work for an hour or so and do some observations as well as ask people what they thought of our projections (which is pictured above) during lunch. We wanted to see whether our visuals would trigger conversations between users of the space. We were on our toes with anticipation and excitement and nervousness and stuff. #wild
How Shreya got the attention of our users.
As customers got up to leave, Atossa and Shreya chased after them at lightning speed to spend an elevator ride to ask them some questions. They presented them with cue cards, which proved to be a simple and effective way to get conversations going. Insights ranged from: “After seeing the illustration of the Rijksmuseum, I realized that I haven’t been in 11 months” to “I thought it was pretty, but so what?” Interesting answers, and Lisanne was pretty pumped that they realized that it was the Rijksmuseum. It’s the little things…
Wednesday was our second official peer pitch, which went fairly well, although we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of presenting in a clear format. We got loads of valuable feedback, however, and were able to apply it to edit our presentation for our stakeholders (read: Must. Rehearse. Presentations. Beforehand.)
Shreya presenting. People, well, listening.
We headed to the Volkshotel on Thursday afternoon, and met up with our stakeholders from the hotel, OBA and the Sound and Vision Institute. It was heel leuk to finally have everyone together for our presentation. It was even better when, after our presentation, our clients started brainstorming together (read: dream come true). We got advice for our next sprint such as focusing more on Oost, and it’s landmarks (as opposed to Amsterdam in general), and finding a way to generate more meaning through the Sound and Vision archived footage.
Frites uit Zuyd, lekker lekker lekker.
After our pitch, we had our retrospective with Gijs, which we formatted as: Start, Stop & Continue (what we want to start doing, what we want to stop doing, what we want to continue doing). We were able to pinpoint things on a specific level (such as using name tags for our Scrum board) to a more general level (such as having a better relationship with our stakeholders). We also had a retrospective with just the five of us, which involved a lot of honesty and a lot of feelings. We went out for fries afterwards for some extra special bonding time.
Workin’ it.
We topped off the sprint by going to Eindhoven on Friday with Felipe and Tamara for a projector workshop at the STRP Biennale. Kimchi and Chips hosted, and we learned how to open up our projector, take out the colour wheel and improve the brightness of a projection. It was pretty nifty, but the real highlight of the day was the Biennale itself. The projects were outta this world, and we all felt real emotional afterwards. And mind-blown. Yes, very mind-blown.
Til next time.