Ben's Week 7 Commentary

Ahh To break through the madness of minute to minute life to communicate past events to others, such tasks at times hurt bad, but i should be able to tweak this so as to be of some use also to myself. Or Yes, i remember now, the act of writing is helpful to my as an end in itself, so let this work-out begin...
This past week was about consolidation.
Tuesday we had to present our data to the class. While the presentation may not have gone as planned, this deadline proved to be very useful as it got us started on consolidation. We met up monday and took an approach not explicitly following the book's plan. We wrote up some bullets for each of our users trying to capture things we learned that were specific to that single user. Then we went though and categorized them into some basic domains. These domains were to be the core of our presentation. But then there were issues. I felt like it was sort of invalid, because it seemed as if we were glossing over the consolidation process and maybe we should just sort of focus on what data we had, and not try to make it seem like we were further along than we were, but ultimately i think it ended up being a helpful process.
We had been posting most of our stuff up on our wiki, and as a group i think we were getting to be a bit proud of it, so we thought i showing it off a bit during out presentation. We decided not to and opted for a full powerpoint, but when we failed to have enough foresight to get this fully ready to go (missing adaptor), it seemed to be a good chance to bestow the wiki to the class. unfortunately, one of our members had updated and changed the organization of the wiki that same morning and the rest of the group was unfamiliar with the changes, so we could not even pull that off.

Some of my group was worried that Prof. Hollan's response to our presentation meant that we were going about the whole project wrong, and that we were not focused enough, etc. But i think he actually understood what we had communicated and that we were on the correct path, with our looking at people's study habits...

Thursday we worked on our affinity diagram and almost completed it. This was a helpful step for all of us, and actually somewhat enjoyable. Really showed us that we actually had done a good job with data collection.
When we initially started this project we had tons of design ideas, and in talking to another teammate i realized that the opinion was shared that we might not be able to find data which would explicitly support some of our ideas. As it turns out we are finding lots of our ideas appropriate, and expanding on many of them in unforeseen ways.

Saturday we had a productive meeting with four group members in which we interpreted the last group contextual interview, and worked on consolidating the flow models. We also talked about some design ideas. And got our priorities straight for the upcoming week. We realized how productive it would be to get some of our informant's notebooks and make some artifact models. This will be done...
I worked a bit more after the meeting to clean up and capture the consolidated flow, and also to put a long sequence model posted on the wiki into a more appropriate form so we can work on consolidating some of those.

there was a meeting on sunday night, which i completely slept through (napping gone wrong) I was upset about this.

One issue i have been trying to voice, is that i know there is more data that is not evident in our affinity diagram... Data we havent collected in any of our interviews. Example: I have used facebook to contact people in classes i have taken in which i do not know anyone. I have done this a total of three times in my undergraduate years here. This is not represented in our interviews, but is real for me (and must be for others), and i know its relevant. How can i get it in there? It seems as if i should just be able to make up some affinity notes about it, and just throw them in, but that seems not right. Perhaps stuff like this will just come out in the design of the system....

The Other thing i realized that made me happy was the idea of designing a system. And we dont necessarily have to deal with the specifics of implementation right away. This will allow us to deal with abstract ideas, so when we think of things like, A study lock, to force students to study and not be distracted, we dont have to necessarily theorize that it should be implemented by making their laptop stick on a certain application... because possibly it could also be implemented by throwing a student into a dungeon with only their study materials... (dont know if that idea was articulated correctly, but thankfully its not very important.

Onward.