The Project

In my opinion this was one of the most interesting projects of study. I really liked working full time on the same project. It allows you to focus on it completely without the distractions of other projects and subjects. It also was very helpful for learning about collaborarting in a team. The main reason that I learned more about working in a group is simply because your’e doing it almost 24/7, in contrast to the couple of smaller group projects we did earlier.

What I also experienced is that it is a bit hard to get the role you initially wanted to have. Which made it a bit harder to work on your personal learning goals. I decided I wanted to become scrum master, and put together the team. What i quickly found out is that almost everyone identifies him/herself as either a visual artist or a storyteller. Almost noone wanted to be a technician or programmer. As a result we did not have a real technician or programmer. That meant someone had to take that task upon himself. But more about that later.

The beginning of the project felt a bit chaotic, unstructured and unclear. There was a lot of new information to take in every day. While we were developing our concept, new criteria and things we had to take into account came up. The concept constantly changed and adapted to these things. I personally really like this. You start with a concept, and while you do research and learn new things you tweak the concept bit by bit. But it will never be really finished, nor will it ever be perfect.  At some point you just have to decide this is what we have to go with. On the way of making your concept reality and after it is finished you’ll always encounter things that you think could have been executed better or differently. From which you always learn something.

Later on, when we exited the concepting phase, and started realizing, the project became more structured, in the sense that everyone knew what was expected and we could really start working on something tangible, instead of a concept on paper.

The Team

As scrum master I wanted to have a team where everyone had their own role and the members think on the same line. The first thing seemed almost impossible since almost everyone wanted to be a visual artist. Programmers were in high demand, and were selected first and out of stock very quickly. I decided to focus on putting together a team of people  that seemed to think on the same level. In previous group projects there always was someone who would complain a lot about things (in a negative way, i do realize critique is an important aspect), which destroys group morale, motivation and productivity. I wanted to prevent this by only selecting people that I think would fit together.
I could not have wished for a nicer team this project. I heard a lot of teams fight during the past 9 weeks, while we always remained friendly, calm and helpful towards each other. What I think was the best thing about our team is that we listened to each other, respected each others opinions. Nobody put their opinion in front of someone elses. When we disagreed we discussed the problem and we would come to a rational conclusion. All in all I think we worked really well together.
There was Jan, who worked well as a morale booster, while also being in charge of buiding the installation. Cedric always remained calm and always added practical feedback and thoughts on what we were discussing. Ibrahim who had a clear vision on how things should be and did a great creative job on creating the 3D models and audioboards. And last but not least there was Colene, the most friendly girl ever, who just really put in a lot of work. She made a lot of designs and iterations on the housestyle, website and 3d models, while also doing research on the side. I will discuss myself in more detail later.

A thing that could have gone better, and what we realized every time during a reflection, is our planning. The scrumming was not optimal, which is partly my fault, since I was scrummaster. We used a digital scrumboard but noone really used it. We used it more as a to do list. Although we didn’t plan too well we made rough plannings for each sprint which worked for us. We also didn’t do a lot of standups. But we always shortly discussed what we had been working on. Although everything worked out and we stuck to our planning, I feel like we could maybe have accomplished more when we used scrum the right way. I choose the role of scrummaster because I think a good planning is very important for a project like this and I wanted to learn more about guiding a group through a project like this. I found out I’m not very good at it and I still have a lot to learn.

Me

As I mentioned before, there was a shortage of programmers and a surplus of creatives. I also am someone who likes visual design better than programming. Noone in our group really liked programming or wanted to do it. But since I was the one with the most experience (I think, because of my experience in my previous study) I took the task of programming upon me. That meant I didn’t really learn anything as a visual designer, as I intended and indicicated initially in my personal learning goals.
I do feel like I did well as concept designer. In the beginning of the project I told the group I wanted to do something, preferably without screens, and an original form of interaction. So not the standard digital interface or the buttons everyone uses. The interaction needed to feel natural and needed to be memorable.
When looking at my third learning goal, marketing, I feel partially happy. We did come up with some original and cool ideas for a campaign, but because of time and budget reasons we were not able to realise some of the ideas. We also kind of postponed the campaign til the end. But I realize now having clear plans for the campaign was something we needed to have done as soon as possible, so the execution of it could have been done on time and at the right times.
Communication and project based working also went very well. Everyone really did their own part while still communicating cleary with each other to give feedback and advice and so all parts would come together easily in the end.
My entrepreneurial attitude also has improved a bit. I always tried to be there and finish my work in time. I do feel like i could have done better with communicating towards partners and sponsors.
Overall I am really content about how the project turned out and how I developed myself, in the sense that I learned new things but also recognizing my own flaws and mistakes, which can be improved in future projects.