Wyatt's Week 8 Commentary

I didn't post a week seven Commentary.
Of course, I had not noticed until today. I was out of town almost all of last week as I saw on our meeting last Tuesday I was very behind because of that. I came back to see that most of our models were consolidated and the affinity diagram was all but finished. I really wanted to be a part of this process and i regret having missed so much. However, I have been working diligently to make group meetings and provide what ever help I can. The result has been promising as we are just about ready to start the visioning and design phase.

I feel like i have mostly been working as a mediator for our process. Just like the last two weeks we are still getting more of our arguments about the process of design and not the data. For example we had a major disagreement on the precise word that need to be on the affinity notes. Because of the Hierarchical feel of the diagram i didn't feel that every note had to be explicit. Rather they would only need to summarize the categories and help us understand what we should be looking at overall. Eventually we did come to the agreements to make a valid and useful affinity diagram.

I think it will be very helpful at this point to make sure that we have usable copies of all our diagrams and notes so we can put those in our final folder with the final paper. I know that we have spent so much time as a group working on the idea of design, that we have a break in between each step. Because each one feels like a separate process we separate the procedure to concentrate on one part at a time. As a result when it came time to consolidate we needed to track down all the models and go over them again to remember what we need to draw into a consolidation. Just to double check we need to have all the models, our artifacts, the consents, and the design ideas all in one place so we can reference them easily.

This is the basic irony of our project.

We are trying to develop a system that will give this accessibility of information to students and we are trying to do that in the absence of the program. We have a Wiki, but there are a lot of problems with it as well:
It fairly disorganized, requiring a large amount of search to find a specific piece of data.
It needs to have a similar structure for every member of the group to fallow, otherwise the data is presented in many different ways adding to the organizational problems already mentioned.
It is hard to use the Wiki for consolidation. We need to be able to reference all the models we have to get a clear picture so that we can and the Wiki will only allow for one to be viewed at a time. This just goes to show the need for this sort of design focus even outside of the study process.

We meet on Sunday to begin visioning and we will continue on Tuesday.