Week 2: Revisiting Our Idea of the Interactions & Splitting Responsibilities

This morning, we had a FATConsult session with Matthijs and Kacper. It was very helpful because the feedback they gave us was critical, reasonable and constructive. Later today, we revisited the planned implementation of our concept and distributed responsibilities within the team.

---

FATConsult & Interaction Simplification

Matthijs and Kacper liked our idea, they found it original and creative. Especially Matthijs was also critical, though, because he has a lot of technical knowledge and knows how difficult it will be to realise our concept from a technical perspective. He advised us to make the interaction simpler, in order to be able to finish everything on time. It is more important to do the things that you do well instead of doing as many things as possible but none of them is really good.

The teachers also suggested that we think about alternatives besides the physical interaction - for example augmented reality. By using AR, we could create physical, plain white letters and the decoration appears digitally. It is a great idea but as a team, we decided against it, because we are really into physical crafting and physical computing.

However, we all had to admit that the teachers had a valid point: Our interactions, as we have planned them, are too complex. Too many things can go wrong and the mere creation (soldering, wiring) of the technical components within the letters will take far too long. Therefore, we met in the lunch break and thought about ways to simplify the interactions.

E: The E interaction is quite simple: We just need the equaliser that will respond to the music played by the speakers in the N. There is no way and no reason to further simplify, as we think.

N: The speakers and the branch decoration cannot be simplified any further.

S: Here, we had to kill one of our darlings. We really thought that it would be a cool idea to draw patterns on the S, but since the LED strip has to be arranged in rows, it has to be cut and resoldered multiple times, which is extremely time-consuming and harbours a critical likelihood of things to break. We therefore decided to simplify the interaction by just using an LED strip and allowing the user to change its colour or to pick a predefined pattern.

C: This letter remains as it was: A whiteboard with a frame.

H: We decided to kill the rotation of this letter, since we need a huge servo motor and a plate on which to rotate - again, there are so many things that can go wrong or not work from the start. We now only have an H covered in a collage of historical pictures.

E: We decided to use bigger lights inside the E instead of a lot of tiny LEDs on its outside. There will be cut-outs in the shape of stars, so when the light bulb inside the E lights up, the light can shine through the cut-outs.

D: For D, we are also going to user fewer LEDs and attach a surface that diffuses the lights emitted by them instead of using dozens of small LEDs.

E: We reduced the number of gear wheels to 8-9. Before, we had about 20 gears on our sketches.

---

Splitting Responsibilities

With all the different tasks that we need to keep an overview of, even our scrum master Julia was overwhelmed. She therefore suggested to split areas of responsibility within the team that need to be organised autonomously by the responsibles. In coordination with the scrum master, everyone needs to set the goals for his/her responsible area, define how to reach the goal and pick other team mates who will help. It does not mean that this person has to complete all the tasks alone but that he/she organises that they get done. Each week, there will be a check of the progress by the entire team.

The responsibilities are split as follows:

• Crafting & Building: Dzhulia

• Hardware: Marije

• Physical Computing: Alex

• Web Development: Julia

• Graphic Design: Marijke

• Audiovisual Content: Nina

We also split up the slides for our demo presentation. Each team member received 1-2 slides that he/she has to fill in for Demo 1. The design of the presentation will be done by Nina.