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Fond Farewell

Wow. That was intense. Great job everyone.

With submission now closed, we have sent our ever-so-important paper and video into the ether for consideration by the ozchi gods. 

If you hadn’t already noticed, we had a fun time. While third time didn’t prove a charm for the mini challenges, we honorably accept defeat at the merciless hands of our victors. It wasn’t quite the conquest we were going for, but a conquest nevertheless.

See you all next time.

- The Normans

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We did it!!! 24 hours later, we delivered. Hope you enjoy the end product!

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The soup made it through the night better than some of us

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We should have done astronauts

Chris

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The end

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Soul Meets Body

With the challenge slowly (or quickly, depending on how far along the deliverables are) coming to a close, I decided that I might reflect upon the last 24 hours.

Where to begin. What a journey. I think we found ourselves. Reached self-actualization. Maybe we’ll go on to conquer great things today. Or maybe we’ll just go to sleep.

I wanted to capture what our team members greatest contributions were. 

Kudos to Jen for keeping us all in line and on the right track. We did it!

Kirsty gave us the infamous avocado and the numerous lols that ensued. Lol.

Leana. Well, she gave us her shoes (because she refused to wear them).

And Chris brought the testosterone.

As for team challenges, I think the biggest one we faced was packing up that damn green screen. It did take three of us and a YouTube instructional video, but we managed to get it in the end. 

What is next for the Normans you ask? What challenge will we storm and conquer with our delicious wit and creative artistic raw talent? Who knows what the future may bring. Maybe you’ll hear our names being whispered down a dark alley on a cold winters night. Or maybe you’ll see us at OzCHI. *shrugs*

10 points to whoever carries me to my bed.

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The race to the finish

Less than two hours to go. Maybe we should start...

Leana still isn’t wearing any shoes. 

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Okay campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ‘cause its coooold out there today!

It’s a nice sunny morning here at ANU, with the mercury currently sitting at -3 degrees. OzCHI 2015 Student Design Challenge preparations are well underway.

...wait...

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Mini Challenge 3 Video is here!

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Mini Challenge 3

So uploading is taking longer than we thought.

Huh. Lessons learnt.

Stay tuned.

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We don’t need a tripod!

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Working day and night

So as much as we love having fun here at ANU, we also love doing high quality research. 

Over the past couple of hours we have progressed significantly (we hope) in our design process. By following our Double Diamond methodology, we have been able to discover our initial problem and existing research, define this problem to determine our research goals and target users, develop prototype solutions, and finally work towards delivering our required deliverables based on our final solution.

In the discovery phase, we worked individually and in groups in order to explore the problem space by conducting literature reviews and identifying key definitions and ideas. Brainstorming formed a large part of this phase, as did the development of a fishbone diagram to identify root causes of social isolation. 

Once we had come to grasps with what we were dealing with, we moved on to the define phase. This entailed identifying our target user group based on our group discussions, and thus determining what goals we wanted our solution to fulfill. That is, from our understanding of the design problem and the existing work in this field, what void could we fill to add value and make a meaningful change toward reducing social isolation. 

We first nailed down our target users. From this we began to develop questions that would be used in interviews with volunteer participants that fell into our target user group. We first ran a pilot to ensure our questions were on point, and then went into full call centre mode and collected a load of data via phone-based interviews.

From our collected data, we then began to draft ways in which our solution would assist these real-world cases. This led to the development of personas, which would influence our later stages and form descriptive use cases that depicted how our solution operates and meets the intended purpose of reducing social isolation.

Great, so now we’ve established a specific direction that our solution will take that will allow it to reduce the social isolation of our target users. And we have some real-world data to back that up. We’ve got personas and use cases established, so then we could easily move on to our develop phase in order to identify potential solutions and prototypes that would tie this all together. 

In this phase we worked in smaller teams to develop potential solutions based on our agreed direction. We ended up paper-prototyping four potential solutions, and - like Silicon Valley - used a good old SWOT analysis on each to determine their feasibility and suitability to the problem at hand. 

This worked like a charm, and we have since narrowed it down to one final solution that we are working to prototype and deliver. 

Now of course I bet you’re wondering where our crying phase fits into all of this. And the answer is everywhere. On going. All the time. But happy tears. Like the kind of happy tears you get when you hear that Golden Gaytime is available in tubs now. You get the picture.

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Second again!!! Noooooooooooooooo!!

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Halfway

Just passed the halfway mark. Spirits are high!

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Chris has been playing Devil’s Avocado all day!!

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MINI CHALLENGE 2.

Based on the Double Diamond technique described in Norman (2013)

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I’ll like it for us, we are all the same person

Leana, in reference to the Heinz soup