Touch Technology

Hannes Netzell

2007-10-11T17:01:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-11T15:14:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-11T13:57:00.000+02:00

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

Hannes Netzell

2007-10-10T16:46:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-10T15:54:00.000+02:00

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

Attention: Time For Exhibition!

2007-10-08T13:34:00.000+02:00

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

John Andersson

2007-10-05T17:39:00.000+02:00

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

Annie Göthesson

2007-10-03T16:06:00.000+02:00

Since I was at home with some kind of illness (fever or something) yesterday I missed the setback the group where hit by. Feels a bit shitty that the work we’ve put in on the interface earlier was just a waste of time, but what can you do (the new interface looks so much better anyway!)

After all the years I’ve been studying project management I should know by now that planning is the most important part of a project and that every problem can be solved with good planning. But in some strange way I seem to forget this every time I start a new project. If we would have thought through what we really needed our device to do we could have prevented this from the beginning and we would probably not have wasted all that time. Now this particular problem wasn’t that serious but what would have happened if it was? Luckily this school is all about learning by doing and it’s in fact OK to make mistakes as long as you learn, and I have learned. Hopefully I’ll remember it next time.

Today I’ve been working with characters for the two player game. Not much but at least it’s something. I can’t really give a 100% right now since I’m still feeling a bit ill and my head is about to explode. Hopefully I’ll be better tomorrow when it’s time for Resumébar.

Over and out!

/Annie Göthesson

David Götmalm

2007-10-02T19:21:00.000+02:00

Up til' now we have been more than on top of things, but today we hade our first real setback.

The setback was made out by a lacking in programming skills and underestimation of how extensive creating a two player flash game could be. After hours of rethinking we finally came up with a solution. It's kind of hard to explain what it was made out of, but we were all content with it. The day started as usual with a morning brief around 09.30 but it wasn't until lunchtime that we discovered that we hade a big challenge ahead of us with the 2 player game.

However when we finally solved our problem the wheels started to turn again.
Overall our project is coming along fine and I am sure that we are going to finish in time.

My contribution today has been to do practical jokes on my fellow classmates. For example I signed up my desk neighbour to a diaper company's newsletter and made a binocular out of a toilet paper roll that I fitted with some not yet dried paint and asked some people to take a look thru it...
I also made some use of myself today. I finished the magazine brief that we are to send to Karlskrona and I contributed to the solving of our programming problem. I am looking forward to tomorrow because we are near finishing our first scale prototype. And tomorrow is the final day before the resume bar and I think everybody is looking forward to it.

Yours truly.

/David Götmalm

David Lundmark

2007-10-01T15:35:00.000+02:00

Today we started out with a meeting where we discussed what had to be done this week. My main task for today was to sketch up and start on the programming for our flash game. But the (socket) server we put up last week had chosen to quit on us, so I sat the whole morning troubleshooting it. At last I found and solved the problem, so hopefully it will stay alive for the rest of the project. So for a few hours now me and John have tried to do the basics of the game. A fun thing about actionscript programming in flash is although I have programmed actionscript for a pretty long time now there is so much I learn every time I'm programming.

But i'm still a bit confused if i should continue programming actionscript 2.0 or if i should trie learning actionscript 3.0. So far i have only touch the 3.0 language and techniqs a few times.

/David Lundmark

Work in progress: Group Process Meeting

2007-09-28T12:46:00.000+02:00

We had our first group process meeting yesterday, where we amongst other things went through our work process thus far. How we had done it, if we could have done it any better, and how to make this happen. Meaning more efficient and how to maximize and emphasize on our own learning. This can sound easy to achieve, but it's not. However, we sat down in our group and came up with a document, where we wrote down what we could do to make these subjects "shine" even more. We're not really finished, it's still in the process of being written. Hopefully it will help us further ahead in our project.

/Group Three

John Andersson

2007-09-26T12:48:00.000+02:00

You will see some more personal posts from the different group members as the project evolves, where they share their own thoughts and views on our project. Right now, as you can see, this is me (John), writing. :)

The group has done a good job getting the project on it's feet. Things tend to go a bit slow in the beginning, but I think that's just normal. Once you get the ideas going and get a feel for the group, things gets much easier and gets done faster.

Part from that my Macbook Pro's keyboard and trackpad died last week, I can't really say that we've encountered any big problems (yet). Things are coming along well so far. Right now, everybody is just busy doing their part to get things done. The meeting yesterday with Jon gave us some new interesting ideas to play around with.
I will hopefully get back my dear Mac within two weeks.

I will be the official "blogmaster", making sure that the blog stays updated. I will also help David Lundmark with the development of our Flash application. (A good thing, cause I really want to learn more Flash). Tasks such as the Peermarking, we will do together in the group so that everyone can have their say about things. Then one person will put together everything we've said and make sure that it's sent to Karlskrona.

That's all for now.

/John Andersson

Work in progress: Prototype one

2007-09-25T17:35:00.000+02:00

Here are some pictures and a video from todays work.

/Group Three

Work in progress: Monday

2007-09-24T16:18:00.000+02:00

Today we got our main task. To our disposal we have a wireless keyboard and mouse. We started taking apart the keyboard and the mouse, it was interesting to see how things worked under the surface. Once taken apart the keyboard shrunk to a tiny little chip. During the brainstorming session we searched Google and YouTube. We found old guides of how to hack your keyboard into a fully operational gamepad from the 90's, we also found some YouTube videos. Mostly of people taking out their frustration on their keyboards, not that much relevance to our project but still lots of fun to watch.

We will continue our brainstorming during the night and tomorrow we will start working on our project plan.

/Group Three

An introduction: Experience Technology

2007-09-21T10:17:00.001+02:00

The group from left to right: David Götmalm, David Lundmark, John Andersson, Annie Göthesson and on the floor Hannes Netzell.

Touch? What does it mean to us? To feel, to perceive and experience something…the list is never ending.

Our task: Design and develop a product that utilizes touch technology and to set up a blog, so that you can follow our work during the ”Experience Technology” module.

Our direction: Touch. On Monday we will receive our main task. We will then see what we have to work with, which components we will have to our disposal. The rest is up to our own imagination.

While we are waiting for our main task, we have been doing some research and been in contact with the Interactive Institute to make plans for a fieldtrip. Hopefully it will be a great source of inspiration. The Interactive Institute designs interactive devices and arrangements, take a look at their website.

Click here to visit the Interactive Institute website

/Group Three