Future Tools for Journalists

Hi there! This is our first blog post. A week ago, we started on this new adventure at MediaLAB Amsterdam. On wednesday february 4th the kickoff week started and we were introduced to each other and our team coach Margreet. Our team consists of Michelle and Nikki, our Dutch designers. Then there’s our Spanish programmer Javier and our Dutch researcher Anne. Together we form a interdisciplinary and international team:

Kick-Off!

At the beginning of the kick-off day, we all presented our Pecha Kucha presentations, where we had to present our personality, portfolio and presentation. We also had a campus tour, signed the contracts and had pizza and drinks in the evening. The day after, we learned everything about de MediaLAB approach and two alumni came by to tell about their experience at MediaLAB. After lunch, we had our first introduction to SCRUM in a workshop with Alexander. In the afternoon, we started working on sprint 0, that was about the User Scene. Also on friday, we spent the whole day working on the user scene. We also met Miriam from the Institute of Network Cultures, who will help us reviewing our work in the next 5 months.

Second Week

Last monday, February 9th, we started with a Tinkering Workshop from Tamara and Loes. After that, we worked on Sprint 0 and recorded the voice-over of our User Scene in a studio that we reserved.

On tuesday, our designers Nikki and Michelle put some great effort in the animation of the User Scene that we came up with together. Even though the final video was uploaded on 3.30 AM that night, we are really happy with the result. You can see it below:

On Thursday we went to Freepressunlimited, an organization that fights for freedom of speech in war zones and conflict areas. We showed our User Scene and learnt that freedom of speech cannot be taken for granted. On Friday, we had our first meeting with the Persgroep. This was very useful, we discussed all our questions and got answers on a lot of them. We are free to design a tool that fits their needs, which is quite liberating to us, because they won’t restrict us at all! We can’t wait to start our brainstorming sessions about this. On friday afternoon, we created some more user stories and discussed them with Alexander. This gave us a better understanding of using SCRUM.

Lessons Learnt

One of the most important lessons that we learned last week, is that even though you don’t know each other, you can become a great team in a very short time. In a short period, we already gained so many more insights in our subject, which is quite big. We are very excited to keep working on this project the next 5 months and learn much more about this very interesting topic.