j08

The team:
Be
Ben
Chris
Cindy
Ian
Rachel
(and me)

State of project:
We have made good progress, but we still have a long way to go in order to have a finished product. Not many official decisions have been made, but we are heading in some definite directions. We have been focusing our potential user as being related to a suburban family and we've done our research about them, but we haven't made a final decision on the user.

Here are our various brainstorming sheets:
definitions, categories and problems
problem list continued
Users and strategies
Mind map
Day 2 brainstorming

We've been working fairly well as a group, although it is admitedly difficult in any situation to work with a group of 7 people on a project that requires input and feedback from all members, were doing a pretty good job. The room situation makes it a bit difficult to communicate as we can all be sitting near each other, but not able to hear 2 people down. This in turn makes it difficult for all voices to be heard and to know everything that's being said. I'm hoping that when the project gets a little more 'real' we can split up into smaller groups which would make it easier for communication and in feeling more comfortable in sharing their ideas.

We're heading in a direction, albeit fairly slowly, but I'm sure when we make our final decisions on the user and product, everything else will be able to fall into place rather quickly.

For the first day of brainstorming I helped lead the initial brainstorming process so we didn't end up thinking about products and physical things before we brainstormed the underlying details. That was something that went wrong in Design 230 last quarter when one person in our group (who only attended the class half the time) led our only brainstorming session astray forcing us to decide on the direction of our project hastily at the end of class when we realized that all of our brainstorming that we had done had been for naught. By the time the brainstorming tips and hints were posted, we had already covered each element in depth already.

On the flipside, maybe my overconcern for thinking of solutions too quickly without defining the problem has contributed to our lack of final decisions made, and now we have a lot of work to do.

I think now we all realize that we have done the abstract thinking and now we need some concrete decisions in order to meet the deadline.