During meetings we've been trying to do workshop-type activities like the one above aimed at generating a wide breadth of ideas.
I think it is a problem when a concept is hard to communicate. If your own team are not all 100% sure about what the concept is, then trying to pitch it to others is going to be impossible. In addition I think that everyone is unable to work independently because they are not so sure about which elements of the concept can be cut, and which should stay.
As a response to this, I've tried to think of a different way of communicating the DIY Trove concept instead of simply explaining what it is. The first diagram below shows how we as a team scoped DIY Trove, and the one below it is an attempt to communicate the core idea behind the concept.
Diagram explaining our concept from our presentation
Simplified diagram explaining our presentation. To be included in our concept proposal document
Although I don't think the diagrams make our concept that much clearer, I think it is a good start. At the very least the process of making these things forced me to recognise that DIY Trove is mainly about "RoughCuts" and "TroveFolk". I think the next step is deciding on which of the many features we've brainstormed in the past few weeks will support these areas of the concept.
In terms of managing our team, we more clearly decided what roles each team member is going to take. In terms of deciding this I asked everyone in the team what they were interested in getting out of the DECO7180 course, and also what kinds of activities they wanted to do. I also asked Lisa to start a group blog separate from our individual documentation. I thought it would be a good way for us as a team to keep track of our progress as a group as well as serve as a central area to dump any resources and information that needs to be communicated to the group.
In the end we've decided to split the team up into two main mini-groups of two, with Lisa and I working on other things:
- Akanksha and Young will be responsible for front-end technical implementation (CSS, HTML, & Javascript)
- Katie and Mayi will focus on interaction and graphic design of the site (visual mockups, style guide) as well as user research
- Lisa will concentrate of prototyping as well as documenting our group's progress through the team blog.
- I will work on back-end implementation (server-side/database stuff) as well as organising the team.
