Halves Presentation
Most of this week was spent making our Halves presentation. We need to encapsulate our journey and learnings up to this point. This means going over everything we did, but framing it to specifically to showcase our learnings on accessibility and event planning. We’ve definitely encountered a fair share of problems in the past 6 weeks that we did not anticipate, all of which are valid learning opportunities. We had the project naming issue, we initially designed the website with a non-ideal imagery, we had the whole saga with choosing a venue, etc. We’ve walked into a lot of rakes, generally speaking. We will try to capture those, and everything else that has happened, with the presentation.
ChairJam Loose Ends
Some really good news this week – we got a significant number of new participants. A couple of wheelchair-users signed up on Monday, which was a nice morale-boost for the team. In response, we made sure to reach out to any organizations or people who were left on the list. We also redoubled our visitation efforts, going by to visit Protohaven (makerspace), Prototype PGH (makerspace), and CMU Create Lab (department) this week. We chatted with the folks there and left our flyers in the hopes of getting even more participants. These efforts, and, of course, the efforts of the last few weeks, really began paying off over the course of the week. We get a few sign-ups every day, taking our number of registered participants from 3 on Monday to 13 on Thursday, our cutoff day. With Joyride participating as well, that means we have a total of 18 participants at the event. That was enough for us to form 4 teams on Friday, a week out from ChairJam.
We met to finalize the tech we’d like each team to have access to and order whatever it is we don’t have. All the materials in that area should be ready to go by the event. We will be testing the actual set up of the room this weekend on Sunday to find any hidden troubles or issues before the event itself. The workshops for the introductory day are on their way to completion, according to our clients. We also discussed including special guest visits from folks who have expressed a desire to come to ChairJam but an inability to make the full duration. These would act as a sort of expert feedback session and occur primarily on Saturday, if we can schedule it.
With all of these things getting squared away, ChairJam is beginning to feel more like a reality with every passing day. We can’t wait for next weekend!