I guess that yesterday’s mix up was once more due to communication problems. It seems that one really needs to learn the importance of constant communication the hard way. One thing that I have really been happy with so far is work distribution. I don’t mean the work load, because I know that it’s inevitable that some people end up doing less work than others. I mean that I think that I selected the right people to right jobs. Disagree with me if you want to, but I really think so. The people with most technical skills are working on the structure and more artistic (?) people on the graphics, for example.

The only major problems with the project are caused by time, or lack of it. Everyone in the faculty and administration is really busy all the time and so are we. Because this is not the only thing we have going on, everyone is struggling with term papers and possibly with graduation (Bachelor, I mean), too.  Well, it’s summer soon and then work is the only thing people have to worry about. And a great tan, obviously.

My portfolio work is progressing a bit. Now I have drawn up some sketches for the lay-out and graphics and I really hope I’m able to realize those plans. I have also thought about the documents to be put there as work samples: I have a few articles that I’ve written for a stakeholder-magazine/newsletter/whateveryouwanttocallit and I think those could be useful. I’m also thinking about publishing some of my essays (if I can find a decent and useful one) there. Curriculum vitae is obviously a must. Next step is to write down some thoughts about work and collaboration.

Anyway. We completed the Facebook-concepting task rather successfully, in my opinion. Although we did receive some not-so-understanding feedback but anyway. We managed to pull it off quite well and our team was great (thanks guys) and we actually had quite a lot of fun while planning our concept. The concept turned out to be something quite different from our original idea about a hospital, but nevertheless, I liked it a lot.

After midterm-break we started a new project, Vuosikello. We are supposed to create a time and rasks management tool for the Faculty of Humanities. First problem with our project was the roles. Who was going to do what and when. We found our risk manager quite easily (Miia volunteered, bless her:)) but no one wanted to be the project manager. And as usual, I gave in after a five-minute-silence and agreed to do the job. Frankly, I don’t know why because I have no experience in project management whatsoever.

Creating the project plan was my first task and it was surprisingly difficult: what we should, who should do what with whom and when? I managed to draw up something and I think everyone has now some sort of general idea about the project. We have started the first phase of our work, which is finding out the requirements for Vuosikello, and we are meeting today for a check-up. I’m certain that the people in our group are really skilled in many things and they manage to complete this project succesfully. The most difficult part in project management, and this seems always to be the case, is the communication and time management. I think we should really meet on a weekly basis in order to be constantly aware of how the project is progressing. Time…well, only now am I starting to realize that it’s going to be Vappu soon and then we really are in a hurry!

But today we’ll see how people have managed so far and next Monday we’ll have a steering group meeting with Minna and Leena.

And when it comes to the feedback I received from others, it was really nice.  It’s always amazing to hear what other people think about you, it sort of opens your eyes. And you don’t get that kind of feedback very often, do you? I mean nice words about your work. Well, anyway, I managed to use one of the adjectives I got in my feedback  in a job interview

As for the portfolio, well, Leena made some of the questions concerning that a bit clearer. I know already that the technical part of it, actually using DreamWeaver to build the website, is going to be the hardest part. My CV is on standby at this time of the year anyway, so that’s not a problem. I need to start thinking about the possible layout of the pages. I already have a few ideas but I need to try them out to see if they work as planned.

Our Sanctuary, then, is evolving all the time. Our concept has changed quite a bit from our last presentation but it’s all been done based on the feedback we received then. We’ve developed our concept towards a more active approach. This time we’ve been working more sensibly than before. We strated as soon as we got the assignment and we’ve been meeting once a week ever since. In addition, there’s been dozens of emails, too. But we’ll on Monday how we did.

We received some feedback from the others and from Minna and Leena. The feedback was really quite useful and I agreed with what they said: that we should have a more concentrated idea of our concept in order for it work properly. Well, that’s where the problem is. For the last week, I’ve been trying to think of ways to concentrate Sanctuary into few key-functions but it seems that I’m completely out of ideas. One idea (which the others suggested too when giving feedback) was to have avatars in the application. I think that is worth thinking about, it would make the whole idea clearer to the user.

Well, anyway, we are meeting with our group today to plan Sanctuary furhter and to chop our next tasks into smaller bits so that we can start working individually with them. I hope my team mates allow me to take the responsibility of writing some of the use cases because I don’t want to struggle with Photoshop if it’s not absolutely necessary.

I’ve been starting to think about my portfolio, which is due in May. I’ve started the process by looking through some portfolios from students of TC in the previous years. It’s really a bit frightening, their portfolios all look so nice and I don’t know if I have the skills for that. But we’ll see.

We’ve started working on our new Facebook concept. The concept is called Facebook Sanctuary and it’s all about getting away from the madness of Facebook. I think our team has done a pretty good job so far. Although we came to the conclusion in our last group meeting on Tuesday that we suffer from a collective form of ADHD-syndrome (which made things more interesting, I think…) we managed to plan our concept further and develop into a marketable idea.  I’m really excited about this assignment because I think it really shows how creative people can be if they want to. Our concept started off from the word hospital and now we have developed plenty of stuff around that word!

Last Monday was the day of our first Habbo-brainstorming session, too. As Miia and Ulla have already written in their blogs, our session in Habbo was very close to turning into a disaster. I was getting ready to smash my computer and swear that I’ll never use such a stupid software again, when we finally realized what had been the problem all along: we weren’t close enough to each other. It was a bit embarrassing, though, not having realized it earlier and spending all that time logging in and out of the hotel. Everyone’s avatars were amazingly correctly portraying their owners: it was almost like talking to real life Miia, Susanna and Ulla. Ok, not really, but almost.

I think that Habbo might be a nice place for teenagers to hang out and spend some time but it was a bit inconvenient for brainstroming. You are not allowed to write very long sentences and all your great ideas have to be divided into smaller bits. In addition, the balloons disappeared quite quickly so I needed to be fast in taking notes. Luckily my team mates stopped talking every now and then to give some time to complete the notes. Now we have set up a wikipage to process our categories further and I think we’re getting there.

When it comes to Second Life, I haven’t still been able to work everything out there. I’m still stuck in the tutorial island and keep trying to drown myself quite regurarly. I think it’ll take some time before I know how to manage Grenadine (my avatar) properly. Then again, I don’t think I have all that time right now because I do have my first life, too.

But anyway, back to businness. We finished the first versions of our use cases on Tuesday and started commenting on the other team’s (Team Funky) work. I don’t think that any of the teams did really well on this first round. Perhaps we all misunderstood the task or everyone else is in a hurry, too, at this time of year. It was surprisingly difficult to gather all the information for the use case and then to decide what is essential and how to present it in the clearest way possible. Hopefully our new use cases have more success than the previous one.

In addition to the use cases, the deadline for the Media&tools-article is drawing near. I really haven’t had time to think about it that much but at least I took a quick tour around the SecondLife webpages in order to familiarize myself with the topic. I need to write article over the weekend, I guess.

It’s only a month to Christmas and after that it’ll all get easier because I’m not going to be working in the spring term.

We discussed the issue of stereotypes and personas after the lecture. I think that Pirita, for example, is clearly a stereotype of a middle-aged nurse. However, I don’t think the problem is stereotypes as such but the fact that people don’t recognise them or that they become restrictive. Instead of thinking “Pirita would never do that”, designers, marketers etc. should ask themselves ” How can we help Pirita in learning how to do this?” or ” How can we make Pirita want to do this?”. So, in my opinion, stereotypes should be seen as challenges for the future instead of seeing them as insurmountable problems or letting them restrict product design or marketing.

Women are clearly an underestimated group of users of technology and I don’t think that producers of technological devices have realized how much potential they are losing by not investing properly on women. Painting stuff pink is not enough to get women involved!I really think that there is feminine and masculine technology or at least we are encouraged to feel that way: in many environments women are not encouraged to learn how to use, say computers but instead, they are assumed to know how some strange bread-making machine works only because they’re women. I think what Janika and Marika said about their persona “Irma” and her different roles in different environments is interesting. There is a real challenge for designers: how to get Irma involved at home, too?

Yesterday we met with our home team and combined our findings from the interviews. We started creating our persona, which turned out to be quite a fun task. I now feel like we actually know this “person” very well, because we imagined all sorts of things about her life: where she lives and with whom, what she does for fun and what sort things she could say about technical equipment. We managed to write the texts for our presentation quite quickly, and as Miia was operating as our graphic designer, InDesign didn’t cause any trouble at all!

I’m quite happy with our results and I just hope that the presentation goes well on Monday. By the way, I was wondering if we should convert our InDesign-document into pdf-format for the presentation?