Screen Dream Team
It was another busy week for our team (we’re working on coining a new name for the team, something like “Screen Dream Team” and getting some shirts made up). We’re over halfway through our first sprint (most of which has been spent staring at the SCRUM board), Atossa is learning Adobe Illustrator (and is a total pro already), we met the Volkshotel’s graphic designer (Erjee Vroling) and have started on our research paper (hello proactive people, Atossa and Orlando).
Sit down stand-up meeting.
One of the most challenging things at the start of this sprint was actually filling in the SCRUM board. We spent a lot, lot of time in sprint planning sessions and writing and rewriting out tags to put on the board. Not only is it hard to learn and fully appreciate a new method of working, but sitting down with very different five people (with very different brains) and coming up with a strong, single concept is erg moeilijk. Seriously.
Redoing our board, over and over. And Lisanne is most confused with Nikhil.
Eventually we worked things out – more or less – thanks in large part to our geweldige SCRUM Master Atossa. Then it was go time.
Current SCRUM progress. Gettin’ er done.
We decided to focus on the Volkshotel for this sprint, so we worked to specifically design content for them. We began doing research to understand the hotel from different angles: visually, technically, from a user’s perspective and from a research perspective. We worked on a mood board, created user scenarios and storyboards. Nikhil handled the backend of things… using technical wizardry to connect Twitter to the frontend. Oh, and Shreya and Orlando are learning CSS. Ain’t no thing.
Shreya’s I got this face.
We had our first Translate session on Wednesday, which went swimmingly. The team that we will be working closely with (whose project is aptly titled “Increasing social interactions through public screens”) presented their findings and goals to date. They are looking to develop an intelligent environment through sensors to encourage people to interact more in spaces such as MediaLab. Super interesting stuff. We presented our work right back at them, and got lots of feedback (such as how we need to step back and abstract our ideas even further). We attempted to shed some new light on our project through Reframe, and came up with a new problem statement: We are looking to create “dynamic, responsive and context-aware content, relevant for the environment and merges with its surroundings”.
Cool display signage at the Volks.
On Thursday, Shreya and Lisanne met with Erjee to discuss exciting things like typefaces and colour palettes used by the hotel (as there is no brand manual for the company). We got to hear a bit more about the interior environment, and how that was designed. The hotel is really by the people, with different styles and tastes coming together to produce the eclectic style that exists now.
Atossa knows the best joints.
We’ve got less than a week before we present the results of our first sprint and the pressure is on. So we went out lunch to Geflipt for burgers (read: we’re all still dealing with food babies right now) as a final treat before we get into the craziness of next week (and a bit of our weekend). We’ll keep you posted on how it all comes out. And remember – follow us on Twitter @iscrnmedialab15! #fun