Category: Week 1: Co-Creative practice

At the start of this module I was apprehensive about working in a team. I have never worked on a project for as long remotely with other people. This throws a whole load of possible problems and areas for downfall into the mix. In order to work together a few key things need to be addressed and worked on for my personal development and the benefit of the team.

Benefits

The biggest benefit of working together as a team are the other skills and view points that the other designers and developers will bring to the joint project. From project management and business experience to design and development, everybody in the course has a varied and high quality level of expertise. My downfall in the modules so far has been translating my ideas and designs to a fully functioning app prototype. In the last module I fell down in this aspect and I am hoping that along with the other team members I can raise my level and feed off their expertise.

Another positive is that it greater reflects how work if done now in the app development world and in the gig-economy. More work is being done remotely due to wanting the best skills and having to work remotely to facilitate this. Gaining experience in working in this manner will be a positive part of this module.

Negatives

The negatives of working remotely are fairly obvious. It is more difficult to collaborate as you will not be working at the same time, in the same manner and as teams historically did. If you need something done by another team member it makes it more difficult to request and discuss this work. Different timezones and working habits will also make this module interesting to say the least. The mix of people who have different commitments, different work habits and work schedules will create pain points along the way. However, overcoming this will be key.

Overall, I am looking forward to this module but I am apprehensive about working in a team of individuals I have never met and who have different desires from this course. Working through these problems will be the immediate task when we are assigned our teams.

This module has set us a theme with which to start our creative practice, generate ideas and work together on a unified project. The theme was randomly generated and therefore could have been as limited or random as the three words allowed. However, the words draw work well together and instantly started my creative thoughts flowing.

These are my first ideas for the app jam that we were subsequently set in week 2.

Withdraw

Retreat, Renounce, Remove, Shy, Quiet, Extract, Abolish, Take away, Dissolution, Renounce, Cancel, Terminate, Recession, Back-down, U-Turn, Retire, Disconnection, Separation.

Police

Govern, Law and Order, Control, Regulate, Oversee, Implement, Regulate, Supervise, Monitor, Guard, Protect, Defend, Peace, Authority, Enforce, Patrol.

Difficult

Demanding, Strenuous, Arduous, Burden, Inconvenient, Archaic, Tough, Problematic, Unfathomable, Formidable, Dispute, Confronting, Imposing, Unalterable, Stubborn, Uncooperative, Puzzling, Baffling

Initial ideas:

The combination of these three words creates a fascinating amount of possibilities for the theme of this app jam. My initial thought was an app that gives power to the public (users) to better police/regulate/govern their lives, community etc. This task is usually difficult and inconvenient but could be made easier with an app. This could also tie in nicely with the use of locative apps or AR by either placing the user in a setting/experience our allowing them to GPS tag problematic areas or situation. Below are a few initial ideas that may be interesting to progress.

Idea 1: 

An app to highlight bad sustainable practices in shops, supermarkets etc. The user photographs and tags products that are unsustainable, use excess plastic or cannot be recycled to lobby the government to make changes. 

Idea 2: 

Users group together to collect resources (GPS tagging, photographs, videos etc) to present to council about problems and issues in their community. This can be used to promote change and fix real problems.

Idea 3:

App pairs with wearables to create a customisable alert that is triggered by your wearable or phone.You can set specific alerts, functions etc if you get in trouble, if you have an emergency etc. GPS location is always viewable for certain individuals.  Have a serious medical condition, then you can create an alert for a family member. Take part in extreme or dangerous sports then have this send messages to family and contact emergency services. 

These are just a few ideas that I thought of immediately and over the next week days more ideas started to form.