Our first week! This week is all about learning what our project requirement is and getting to know each other better!
Coming into the semester, all we had was our project description! Here it is for posterity:
As Hunt Library evolves as a premier 21st century library, the scope of its services and spaces that invite scholarship, collaboration, and creation is ever-shifting. We seek an experience crafted to create a destination that is transferable to other spaces and formats, as well as being pop-up in nature. The experience is communicated through the tangible, universal language of LEGO, integrated with at least one emerging technology currently incubating at CMU. This student-driven project maximizes CMU and LEGO’s shared core feature: collaboration to pull order from chaos and form from idea through design and technology. This project should extend the limits of novelty and innovation while remaining functional and reproducible.
As the ETC project Playgrounds developed experiences to showcase a technology, this project will show off LEGO coupled with CMU technology, for which at least one candidate ready for integration will be presented to the team in its first week. As the ETC project Aristeia explored the maker space for museums, this project will explore the use of library physical space to enable its patrons to experiment and tackle challenges.
With this project description and the advice of our faculty advisors Scott and Shirley, we decided to head down to explore the various libraries on main campus in person to get a better sense of what the spaces are like and what they are being used primarily for!
First stop: Hunt Library
Second stop: Sorrells Library
Last stop for the day: Mellon Library
Very happy with the LEGO sets given to us by the client for prototyping~
Ideation
Week 1: Core Philosophies & Motivations for Design
This week was all about ideation – but before that, understanding the space we were working in. This includes our project description, what the client’s requirements are and stakeholder constraints in general – including what we want as a team!
We did some introductions amongst ourselves where we shared our personal strengths, weaknesses, interests and past experiences. We also shared what we want to learn or get out of this project. This really helps us get a sense of initial direction for the project, but also will be useful down the road for making sure that everyone is working on something that they find meaningful.
Since our project task was to showcase LEGO and technology, we also made a list of inspirations by mapping out our favorite games, experiences, and what our favorite LEGO kits and sets are, as well as a short list of what kind of technologies that we were interested in pursuing for this project. This list included:
- ARKit/ARCore (mobile AR
- AR/MR setups employing computer vision with depth sensors
- Physical and tactile buttons and sensors like Phidgets or Arduinos
- Projection mapping
Having mapped out our space, we then reviewed what our priorities were as well as out main inspirations, taking particular note of things that were brought up multiple times during the discussion, and distilled it down to three main design pillars.
- FUN (playful/magical/surprising)
- Collaboration
- Innovation
These help in aligning our motivations with respect to the type of experience we want to ultimately create, not by the specific details of what we would create but rather by the high-level emotional core of our team.
Other notes:
- Ideation: wanted to understand where the group was at (without any collaborative ideation yet) with respect to their conceptualization of what the final experience might look like to gauge our regions of interest
- Undertook a couple of rounds of collaborative ideation sessions, ultimately with the goal of distilling down the team’s priorities and main inspirations (if teammates reiterate ideas, this generally indicates a strong interest in elements of that idea)
- Stakeholders: understood the topic space and core constraints from the client, and well as our faculty advisors (and John Balash)
- Hunt team wants the experience to be an interactive physical installation that involves LEGO, but is curious to hear what our team is thinking in terms of ideas
- ETC would like to showcase its innovation in the entertainment tech field and our team is also interested in creating something magical that showcases the strengths of emerging tech within a playful context
