Week 1 & 2

Greetings! We’re City of Stars, and this semester, we’ll be making an interactive mixed reality mobile app to accompany the soon-to-be-constructed Pittsburgh Walk of Fame.  The first point of discussion this week revolved around the roles each of us would be embodying on this project, which are:

Fangda Luo: Producer and Artist

Naomi Burgess: Experience Designer

Mohan “Momo” Bai: UI/UX Designer and Artist

Yifei Zhao: Programmer

Vasant Menon: Product and UX Designer

After much discussion, we arrived at City of Stars for our team name, as it conveys the motives of the project quite well. Our project instructors/advisors are ETC faculty Shirley Saldamarco and Scott Stevens, who we met with during our first week. They advised us to conduct our research by studying similar applications in the market and getting ready to meet our clients. We then sat down as a team and made a composition box, outlining the resources we should take inspiration from, what kind of product we wanted to create, and what needs we were solving for our target audience. We presented our composition box at the ETC’s Playtest To Explore Workshop and improved upon our ideas the ideas we presented.

We spent the rest of the week in a cycle of research and meetings. We each assigned ourselves work that would help us brainstorm ideas for our app, and we also had regular design sprints to help us take a look at our content from all angles. We compiled all of our results and made a slide deck that we presented to our clients Prentiss Orr and Nancy Johnson (who represent the Pittsburgh Walk of Fame initiative), with good feedback. Next week, we’ll start implementing and testing some of our design ideas, as well as look more into the tech side of things and outline how we should approach the rest of the semester, week by week. See you next week!