Thursday 11 October 2007

Hannes Netzell

Reflections on project management. As the appointed project manager for our contribution to the experience technology module I have made some reflections on leading this kind of work. I wish to share them with you blog readers. These reflections derive from my reality only and are not engraved in stone. One lesson learned is the one of what lies within the project managers responsibility area. Without the proper education within management this becomes a guessing game were trial and error is the only way to approach the challenge. The method of trail and error suits me fine.

I had the advantage of having David in my group whom has former experience in leadership. The profit was that he could coordinate me and give me tips that helped me in my role as a project manager. Another lesson learnt was that planning and preparation must be a big part of the managers responsibility. Last but not least I found it to be very important to follow up with the planning and sharing it so everything can be visualized for the rest of the group.

These were the main reflections I had concerning project management and today is my last day being a project manager, but I am convinced that it’s a role I wish to have again.

/Hannes Netzell

David Götmalm

Today is the day of our exhibition! The day started with a breakfast exhibition for specially invited guests from the digital media world. Due to our winning concept to keeping it simple the group could afford being relaxed and focus on our presentation. We made a schedule pointing out how to take turns in our exhibition monter. Later in the afternoon the exhibition was open fore the public and as time went by more and more visitors came by our monter.

Overall the reactions were positive and delightful. In our monter we displayed two different prototypes. One being the drum game and the other one the scratching prototype. During the day we observed that the less advanced game (the scratch) being the most popular. This phenomena is probably caused by a familiarity with turntables and hi-fi equipment . People probably relate easier to objects and interfaces that they already recognized.

/David Götmalm

Annie Göthesson

The last couple of days I’ve been working on finishing the article for Group 7 in Karlskrona while the rest of the group have been working on finishing the prototype.

I thought it was going to be tough to write an article about something I had absolutely no idea about and basically never had heard anything about but everything went just fine. I’m glad I been writing a lot of reports in school before, since because of that the “article writing” was pretty much a piece of cake and I finished it long before deadline. I’m glad I got the opportunity to know more about how the LEGO Mindstorms kit work (I must say I’m amazed about how much things such a device can do!!!!), but I would rather have written an article about our own work…just to make sure that everything that was written about our drum kit was correct.

Soon the Experience Technology module has come to an end, and I’m pretty glad it’s over even though it’s been fun. The group has been really great and everyone has been working hard and I’m pleased with our drum game and our “scratchthingy”. It’s amazing what you can do with a keyboard and a mouse in just a couple of weeks.


Nemo playing our fantastic drumgame "uRock"

/Annie Göthesson

Wednesday 10 October 2007

Hannes Netzell


This Wednesday has been a hectic day. I went to school at 8am just to finish our prototype in time. Yesterday I as a constructor faced problems that I had not foreseen. It’s all about that tiny little chip, the chip that before the deconstruction actually was a keyboard.

This picture above,showing a chip with 33 small stripes that in right combinations creates different values in form of key codes.
Every button has an individual value ex. A has the value 321 and that it is what the flash application responds to. So the problem was that I only could find three different values. For me that it’s all rocket science - I went bananas! I couldn’t get it working; lucky me I had an extra hour to fix it until my group would arrived. Wrestling around with those crocodileclammers was a hard game. Some how I manage to fit them into the right places and it felt great!

When it everything was up and running I felt proud of what my group were able to accomplish.

Good work group three, we rock!

Best regards.

/Hannes Netzell

David Lundmark

Tomorrow is the big exhibition. I'd finished all the programming yesterday, I sat at school half the night so I wouldn't have to be so stressed today, the deadline is 17:00 (one hour to go). The drum game works almost exactly as it should, with some few bugs (of course) that I hope nobody will notice.

Today we have puted in place our room where we will have our drum set and scratch. We did a beta test earlier today and it worked very well, better than i expected. I'm a little bit nervous about tomorrow about which people will turn up and what they are going to think about our project. But I'm very proud of the things we accomplished. The rest of the day today I think I will go home and get some sleep so I will be alert and in a good mood tomorrow.

If you accidentally read this post I recommend you to come here tomorrow and watch all the projects, I spyed around at the other classmates projects, and all of them look really interesting and fun. Have a look at the schools homepage here. And if you are attending, don't forget to come to our drumset and show your skills.

/David Lundmark

Monday 8 October 2007

Attention: Time For Exhibition!

YOU are welcome to join us at our experience technology exhibition this Thursday (2007-10-11), from 13:00 to 17:00 at Hyper Island in Stockholm, Dialoggatan 16, Telefonplan.

Click here for directions.

/Group Three

Friday 5 October 2007

John Andersson

Yesterday was Resumébar, so I'm not working at a 100% today for obvious reasons. Things went by quite slow today.

The second group process meeting was very giving and interesting, as always, though I tend to fear them a bit, "oooh no, process meeting again!". One topic that always seems to come back is "what have we learned so far?". There's always a pressure to produce a cool and smart product that you can show off at the end of the project. Our own learning seems to fall between the cracks too often, e.g. meaning that if we need to get something done in Flash, the person who's the best at Flash gets to do that job. But really the best thing to do would be to let the "least" talented Flash group member do the job (if they're interested in doing it and willing to learn that is). I mean, we're here to learn new stuff and to try new things. I don't really know about the other groups, but I would like to say that we in group three are trying to turn this around in a better direction.

Cheers!

/John Andersson