Decompressing after Wednesday's class

So our group met again on Monday. Most of us brought ideas and we spent a lot of time just listing them... I tried to limit each explanation to 5 minutes but with 9 ideas we took up the better part of an hour. The 9 ideas were as follows:

Dish Washing Game

Name That Tune

Double Bass Anti-Hero

Participation TV

Food Pantry Helper

Art Thief

Art Collector

Real Guitar Hero

and

Art Space Ship

During our first in class ideation and sketch presentation, we spent way too much time with ideation, a small amount of selection and similarly very little time on implementation... I was hoping to change this with time limits on ideation, but I think we still lacked in the selection department. I asked everyone for their 2 favorite ideas and it came out

3 votes for Art Collector, 3 for Participation TV and 2 for the Food Pantry Helper... We then decided that the Participation TV had more excitement.

In class tonight the first presentation described a formal selection criteria and I thought that was something we were definitely missing. This became obvious to me because when we selected Participation TV, I became the defacto domain expert. It was not until the Tuesday night that I posted my take on the project and when I did it was amidst other emails full of opting out phrases like:

"my friend who is also in HCI that we need not show a demo tomorrow. That is not required" and

"I think we are confused about the expected group participation for tomorrow night"

I really should have posted my take Monday night... I feel like we lost significant buy-in from the stakeholders between Monday and Tuesday. I spent Wednesday before class building props and getting the cameras and software talking then running it into school. Everything was built between 8 and 10 am and 1 and 4 pm Wednesday before class. It was definitely not feeling much like a group project.

We met briefly before class and figured out roles in the sketch and headed into class. I was sure other groups were going to present something substantial and knew we had to as well. After class we decided to do an additional Friday meeting to correct what happened this week. We discussed time commitments to the class... Grad students agreed on 10hrs/week and our undergrad agreed to do 5. I hope I'm not blowing our cover with this candid report. It's in the spirit of finding the means to tap all of our potential to the max. On Friday we're going to revisit our selection methodology and try to clarify our project choice with a more formalized criteria. It's not that I'm unhappy with Participation TV it's just that it's more important to get our engine firing on all cylinders.