To be honest, we took a bit of a break this week. The lead up to ChairJam was a sprint to get everything in place for the event, and then we participated in the event all last weekend. Taking the chance to slow down and smell the roses for a couple days was an opportunity we were glad to have. Our goals for the week were to reflect on ChairJam and determine specifically what our next steps would be for the semester and following week.
Joyride’s Future
We figured that, because Playtest Day is next Saturday, working on prototypes is our current top priority. After Playtest Day, we will continue development of prototypes based on the feedback we receive and start looking into our ChairJam Kit. The Kit will include both a summary of the first ChairJam as well as an Organizer’s Guide for anyone else who wants to run their own ChairJam. The exact details of such will be determined in a couple weeks, but for now we know we’d like to include sections on Workflow Design, Venue Selection, Prototyping/Creation Materials, Workshops to run, Recruiting, Food, and Legalities.
ChairJam Reflections
ChairJam has come and passed. Overall, we are happy with the event. People were energetic about the work, our prototypes were all various and interesting, and co-design flourished. We do have a few ideas about how it could’ve gone better, however. For example, having an event set aside specifically to give people a chance at sitting in a wheelchair early on could’ve given people at least a vague idea of the questions to ask and paths to explore. We also felt that, while we were glad to have had four teams, our skill distribution wasn’t quite right. The technical experience of team members was a large separating factor, meaning people who had it had more work to do than those who didn’t. We plan to send out a feedback survey to get some opinions from our participants to get a better idea about how they felt about the event. Our reflection is valuable and will inform our final ChairJam Kit, but we need the input from outside as well.