Hello world!
So, it’s friday again: time for an update about all our second week! A week fully loaded with very interesting and inspiring workshops, which gave us new insights about how to work at the MediaLAB, but also about how we should work with each other. Earlier this week we all filled in a Belbintest; which tells you a lot about your personality in a group dynamic. Geert turned out to be the explorer of the group, he’s investigative and is always developing new ideas. The expert of our group is Yannick, he has the skills needed to complete the tasks at hand. Surprisingly Anne and me are both drivers; strong motivators that will challenge everyone to succeed. Oddly enough, nor Yannick, Geert, Anne or me turned out to be a teamplayer, which worried us a bit at first. But after a very open and honest talk with our coach Loes, we all felt like we complement each other, which will help us work better together during our time at the mediaLAB!
Scrumming
Wednesday morning we had a workshop on scrumming – the act of a homeless man or woman having an orgy inside your vehicle (according to urbandictionary.com). But don’t worry, that’s not what we learned during the workshop. Scrumming is actually a working method for groups which involves kilometer of post-it’s. Scrum is a process framework that is being used to manage complex product development. It’s not so much a process or technique for building products; rather, its is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficiency of your product management and development practices that you can improve. The scrum cycle will help us to work in a transparent way and focusses on ‘getting things done’. This week we started our first scrum meeting, in which we defined the tasks that need to be done in order for to deliver the first prototype next friday.
As described above our first Prototype is due next friday the 21th. To try and get a better idea of what we want to deliver on this date, we met up with Bernhard Rieder – Stefania’s supervisor and the leader of this research from the UvA -, Stefania, Gabrielle and Tamara. Gabrielle Colombo is an expert on data visualizations and will help us in this area. Tamara Pinos will help us with the technical parts of our project. Because we did not really know where we should begin our research, we all decided on a starting point for our project, which would be the ‘ Troubled user’. On the one hand, we will try and identify the problem’s the enduser runs into when visiting the unspeak website and on the other hand we will try to stand in the shoes of the producers and figure out how we could possibly improve the data that Google Analytics gives them. Our prototype for next friday will then entail an infographic of a visualization of the problem we are going to solve during this project.
Problem definition
To help us better understand our problem, we attended a workshop given by Charlie Mulholland named ‘problem definition & requirements’. First impression of Charlie was something along the lines of ‘nutty professor’; with wild ginger hair and contagious enthusiasm for his discipline he inspired us to think outside of the box. The assignment was to brainstorm about our project to try and see the project from all the different stakeholders point of view. He also asked us to summarize the problem in one sentence: ‘The data tool that Submarine uses to try and understand their user engagement doesn’t provide the data in such a way that is is actionable for Submarine’. So all in all we can say it was a really fertile week with a lot of fun workshops, new insights and hard work! Now it’s time for a beer and team building, have a nice weekend!