5/20

Monday afternoon the group met for several hours trying to finish up the work models and interpretation sessions for our last few interviews. We felt like we should have started the affinity already but the fact that we had to give a presentation the following day actually seemed to set us back because we had to attend to its details. Some of us met again briefly Tuesday morning to finalize the power point slides and pick the sections we wanted to speak about.
Later that day our group presented a few of our interviews and other data to the class despite horrendous technical difficulties. While watching the other presentations I came to the conclusion that some of the other groups have chosen projects that are better suited for the contextual design process. After our presentation it wasn't immediately clear if the lack of questions was due to our running over the allotted class time or because people really had no questions or comments. Even the professor and TAs were unusually quiet...
On Thursday morning i think the group met. I had other commitments and could not be there, but was around for the afternoon meeting where we actually made a great deal of progress on the affinity. Much of the time was spent deciding how small each section of notes should be and how to categorize each note. Some of them proved to be very similar in character.
The group met again Saturday without me as I again had obligations. From what they tell me they only had maybe three people show up and only made a little progress on the consolidated work models. The affinity was still locked in the Cal IT building and could not be worked on.
I met with Andy and Matt Sunday evening and we hammered out the consolidated flow model. We first attempted to do it the way the book suggested but this proved slow as only one person could work on listing a particular 'player's' responsibilities. While I was waiting for Andy to finish his list I started making a mock drawing of what i thought the consolidated model might look like. I put 'the web' (Internet) in the center instead of the student this time, though i can't remember exactly why now. Andy and Matt seemed to like what I drew, so we stopped listing each "player's" characteristics and started critiquing my model. This save a lot of time and after a few revisions we had what we thought was a good consolidated flow model. Matt and Andy said we made more progress in that hour and a half than in the two and a half hours they spent the night before working on the same model. Sometimes it's nice to have only a few people, but i would really like a time during the week that everyone could attend for 2-3 hours...

-Bryan DB