Bryan's 5/27 commentary

This past week has seen us finish our affinity wall and most of our consolidated models, with the exception of the artifact model and perhaps one other.
I was really surprised at how long the affinity wall actually took to complete. I can't recall off hand how long the book said it would take but my instincts tell me that the authors sorely underestimated the time needed to complete it. On the other hand I also feel that we have an area of focus that does not allow seamless application of the contextual design process. So perhaps that is why the affinity took so long. That, and the fact that some of the group members seemed unwilling to compromise on certain issues during the affinity's development. However, those issues were eventually resolved and work proceeded. I guess what I feel that our strange area of research and dissenting opinions all combined to make the affinity harder than it really had to be.
For the next week I think the group and I really need to have a sense of urgency about trying to wrap the project up. We really haven't even discussed design ideas as a group and I feel like we're really expected to make some kind of recommendation about the system as a whole, or provide a fix to some kind of problem. The hard thing about it is we've been studying how people study, and to do any more than apply our data to the UP system would take a lot of work. More work than I feel we have time for.
The goal for this week should be to have a design idea or problem to work on all picked out by the end of the week. That way we have the weekend to work on it and then the next few days to write the paper and do the power point final presentation. Just saying it now almost sounds like it's too much to get done in that amount of time. The group met today without me. I can only hope they made lots of headway.