Andrew Alexander commentary

This week was hectic as usual. As the summer and the deadline for our redesign nears I have become quite aware of why Prof. Hollan attempted to talk us out of taking this class during the first week. I have met with group members for at least two hours everyday this past week, Monday through Sunday. Although the contextual design process is engulfing much of my free time I can honestly say that I am glad I stayed in this class. I feel that I have learned many helpful tools that I would not have even considered before. Additionally, I feel that this course has sparked my interest into the Human-Computer Interaction side of Cognitive Science, an area of specialization that I had previously ignored.
To begin this week, we met Monday and Tuesday to prepare for our 10 minute presentation on Tuesday. Although in the meetings I felt that we were more than prepared, a combination of technical difficulties and general confusion created a trainwreck of our presentation. However, as bad as it may have seemed, I must admit I am not disheartened. I know that we have gathered a lot of useful data and that ultimately, our redesign will be a success.
Last week we almost completed our Affinity Wall with some small organizational activities remaining, which I hope to complete tomorrow. Furthermore, the affinity wall I feel was the most helpful activity throughout the contextual process thus far, with many design issues and study trends becoming particularly salient throughout the process. As we worked on organizing our affinity notes several design ideas were running through my head which I have begun working on developing.
Over the weekend, a few group members including myself began to work on consolidating our models I feel that last night was particularly productive, where Bryan suggested a structure for our flow model that I feel will prove to be very helpful. From here we must complete our consolidations, begin our visioning and redesign, and ultimately outline a prototype in our paper that will transform the function of U.P. into a study tool rather than lecture tool. I think our ideas will be very beneficial to the actual Ubiquitous Presenter development team on campus.