Octobox wins the Gold award for receiving the least amount of red votes! And we very much appreciate our prize!

Despite some problems with adaquately organizing our recent work, our team met with Thecla this week to discuss the future of our project. In light of the meeting, we have a better grasp on our direction for the next week, before we begin considering focus groups and user-testing. In short, we’ve now acknowledged the need to define and select necessary components; this does not necessarily eliminate various components completely, but better establishes a coherent project that can presented to users.

Towards the end of September, amidst a chaotic time, the Octobox team was divided over the Sustain-A-Stack idea. One of the main concerns was that this whole system would turn out to be overly difficult to implement because of the scope of the project. Let’s face it, we weren’t building a website or some handheld device; we pretty much agreed to stay away from products like those because, first of all, we’ve been building websites all our lives. And secondly, the logistics of handheld devices can easily become an application for cellphones. In other words, we had already established our design values.

So, congratulations to us for a successful presentation this week. Although it went rather well, we expect to be better prepared (in terms of team organization) for future presentations. Big thanks to those of us who pulled an all-nighter and worked up to the very last minute to put everything together.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been considering the importance of physical sketches in better conveying our project and its integrity. These sketches have become a significant component to our design process and given that it is time to finally display our progress in the form of a presentation, it is only fitting to post the sketches that have been created thus far.Furthermore, it is very likely that we will not have time to present these sketches during our presentation. This is because much of our presentation will describe the many other elements we’ve worked on. As it is now, we already plan to integrate an extra slide on design/aethetics values and integrity; thus, we’ll likely be short on time as it is.

This week consisted of evaluating the current state of our project and considering the future direction of the team. Inherent in these steps are the consideration of elements such as: target users, goals, and scope. Evidently, these evaluations have allowed our team to better define our project.

Over the past week, our team has focused on better organizing the structure, direction, and scope of our project.