It's the 4th week in on this project so let me recap what it's about and what we have done so far.
Week1
The project hadn't actually started, in fact it hadn't been approved. The first week of semester is the week that Studio projects get pitched from staff and students. Students then pick their top three choices and Staff decide which projects are worthy or doable and who gets into what. I had to create a presentation and find two members of staff to approve the presentation (which was quite frustrating btw...) and present it in a conceptual way. I found that to be a bit painful and unnecessary to a small degree because I felt I could develop the project conceptually but not in the timeframe of a couple of days on my own.
The Project:
I wanted to build a security system. Last year my mother's house had an attempted break in and that annoyed me. I was out for blood but felt a bit powerless given that she lives 60km away and being a student I often don't have time, money or transport to visit very often. So my reaction was to conceptualise some sort of video camera-based alarm system that could upload pictures immediately to a web server. As I thought about it while on a trip to Mitre10 to buy 2x4 to secure an unused garage side door that someone had tried to force their way in, I realised such a system had commercial viability and that I could probably make it quite cheaply. However nothing would ever come of it. Until last semester when I realised I wanted out of the last project and needed something sufficiently challenging and technical. So I asked Anneke if she'd be interested too. The motivation isn't commercial gain, though that would be nice - but security is not exactly something I'm passionate about and launching a product requires commitment. It's mostly about doing a challenging project and doing it well. With a good team.
Only quite late did I come up with an idea that really made this a bit different and interesting - networking the system into a virtual neighbourhood watch. This is probably what got the project approved....
Week2
The project got approved and I had only one other person on my team. This is exactly what I wanted, and exactly what Anneke wanted too. We both work fairly hard and quite well together and can bounce ideas off each other. We've both experienced what it's like to work with people who live in some alternate reality of what is expected of university level projects and how it can derail something that would otherwise be good and we wanted to avoid that. Sorry, a little bitter about our last one still.
We had a few previous commitments in this week so all we really did was plan the planning. We wanted to be organised and on top of everything and avoid all the headaches that our previous project caused us. I guess we also have something to prove - how our 2 person team is better without deadweight, committees, negotiation on every unimportant or obvious detail.
We jotted down a list of what we wanted in an alarm system. We also decided that we needed an online collaborative system - a project management CMS to keep track of everything. We looked into what was available and installed one called Collabtive on my theothernews domain.
Week3
While all excited about how we can produce results without anyone derailing our efforts it was now time to try to work out what the hell we were going to do. We decided that we should start with conceptual research first. A number of practical projects seem to start with making something and not really considering conceptual stuff until quite a bit later. We decided that because on the face of it a security system is a bit boring and well, it's kinda been done before... several hundred times... we wanted conceptual research to inform us on what exactly we were making. What is our question or our statement.
So this involved asking various tutors what their thoughts on the project were and some recommended readings. I joined the Auckand City library (finally) and we got books from both there and from AUT library.
We talked to Gabrielle, a tutor about our project, to get his insight. I found it helpful for clarifying our thoughts and getting us a bit more excited about what we were doing but I wish we'd thought of recording the conversation. We'll do this in the future.
We set up a calendar in google docs along with a shared folder containing our bibliography, ideas, presentations, a mindmap (mindnode is a free app on the mac, rather good) and the workings of 2 conceptual statements.
It's hard going though. The Michel Faucoult readings, while applicable are certainly not accessible to the uninitiated. We've found a few good books though and have been doing our best to get through them.
Week4
Collabtive hasn't really served us that well, we haven't used it. Google docs seems to work well enough for now. It's too bad Google+ isn't a launched product yet (and not going to be ready for apps users for a few months) because that could potentially have helped even further.
I felt like I floundered a bit this week, I think that conceptual stuff is a bit of a slow burner in our minds in some ways.
We also seem to have been missed out on the first formative assessment. Which would otherwise help us get to grips with things. Anneke has tried to organise it several times, and we were stood up on one occasion. Normally I'm quite understanding of whatever is on tutor's plates but so far this semester we've turned up for things at a specific time only to find they aren't happening or happening later, been given short notice and had to chase people just to talk to them. It's actually quite annoying.
We decided early in the week to attempt to write conceptual statements from what we've learnt. We have learnt a few things and once this post is out of the way perhaps we'll delve into it a bit more.
