Today was the start of our pre-building phase. Every group rotated between the three main discussions about refining our project. The first was about telling a story, user interface, and interaction, the next was about making our projects more aesthetically pleasing and more like art, and the other was discussing the possibility of integrating technology into our project. This caused our team to simplify our project, while keeping the general idea. We originally planned to make a giant metal tree that served as a drum-sculpture, with various instruments sprouting from it.
My role is almost always generating ideas, or refining others. After today's discussions, I came up with the idea to take the tree design that I originally created, and refine it to something more like a garden of flower instruments. This would be far less time consuming and ambitious, but would still be a fun art piece that incites community. Our group also decided that given the time frame, we would only construct three flower instruments, and leave out the light up aspect that we originally planned for. Additionally, as part f marketing and media, I took photos and documented the process. I also found myself delegating tasks to the rest of the group to make sure that everyone was working to complete the documents.
Here is an example of an idea that team member generated that we had to refine and revise
Here is a rough sketch of what our flowers will look like
As a group we decided that for our theoretical product, we would have an aspect of the flower that lights up when the instrument is played. This way if a group of people played, there would be a garden of lit up flowers.
So far, our group is cohesive and mostly on task. Our biggest hurdle is that there are several of us who have a lot of ideas and want to add their own parts in, often getting us off track or over complicating something. Other than that, I think all the groups are struggling to solve the problem given the parameters that the teachers have set. For example, my group originally wanted to do and art piece that changes as you move, but it wouldn't really create community, so we scratched it. But later in the process, we were given examples from the teachers of art pieces that were similar concepts. I think the abstractness of the project was meant to leave it open for interpretation and creativity, but instead wasn't specific enough and so groups strayed away from art pieces thinking that they wouldn't meet project requirements.
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