This week was halves at the ETC which equates to every team summarizing what they have been working on thus far, and presenting their progress to faculty and peers.
Halves was especially challenging for us as our project has evolved and changed throughout the past three months almost every single week. It really wasn’t until last Friday, with our presentation being the following Monday, that we finally settled on a confirmed, set idea of a deliverable, that would not only please us and our clients, but would also be something that the ETC faculty would be excited in as well.
We will be focusing the rest of the semester on creating a design tool kit for the MAKESHOP teaching artists that encompasses self-assessments, a guest interaction model (based on our archetype cube) with corresponding surveys, and a prompt giving card deck with guidelines. Our hope for the card deck is that it will help to prompt discussions between teaching artists on how to facilitate family unit involvement in the MAKESHOP.
Once our deliverable was confirmed, we wasted no time in diving right into the development process. While setting up our halves presentation, the team spent time on visualization and info organization of the card deck and other tools in the kit.
We set our halves presentation to communicate the following information:
- Our cube model demonstrating archetypes of parents at the Makeshop
- Our failed playtests, what we learned from them, and how they impacted our change in who we’re designing for
- Our plan for the rest of the semester which included our future “tool kit” playtests, our plans to validate our product, and our plans to develop it.
We got good feedback from our presentation and support from the ETC faculty. The next three weeks until Softs will very productive and hopefully very rewarding.
- Written by Aly Soto