Jessica Vea

Gayle then found team members Megan and Zane on the Thursday stream and had a conversation about things in which they were interested in doing. I was really happy with our very first meeting we had as we had some common interest. Dating back to my initial idea last semester at the beginning of the term I wanted to look into doing some form of interactive musical project that allows people with disabilities to make their own music. Parts of this idea came from my volunteer work I do where the young people’s mood’s change as soon as music is turned up. I loved their reaction towards music and how it was a form of an icebreaker and time to be free and relaxed. Megan explained that she and Zane wanted to look into creating their own instrument but not knowing why. My idea of making it accessible for people who can’t physically play with instruments seemed to fit that issue. We were happy with this idea of making an instrument that was able to be a tool that people with disabilities can access. My inspiration came from the controller made by Microsoft for those with a disability and seeing the positive results it has on young people as they feel “inclusive”.

Days passed and we realized while researching some implications which would become a really difficult task to do in the future. What I realized while researching was the difficulty of getting time to interview people with disabilities as there are a lot of health and safety cautions that need to be addressed beforehand and also after. Another difficulty I found with our project was not being able to target the correct people on showcase and meaning that we won’t get the vital feedback we need for our project. 

To fix this problem we as a group thought about expanding our target audience while keeping people with disabilities apart of it. The reason being was because we wanted to get as much feedback from our target audience and we found that keeping our target audience to those with a disability limited us as for showcase and figured that it would be difficult to find as many to get an overall result that was relevant to everyone. We could have possibly gotten information from community groups such as ‘StarJam’ and also ‘Connect’ but there are a lot of health and safety things we’d need to do before hand whereas if we were to interview students there would be less of a hassle. We are still going to keep people with a disability in our target audience but we will have also students who don’t know how to play and instrument but wish to do so and through our product.

Our product we are still unsure of as we are still experimenting and finding new things everyday to support ‘why’ we are doing what we are doing. While having a short discussion with Clint today it got us thinking about our product and it seemed like we wanted to do something physical. He gave us some good advice which was to think about drawing it on a piece of paper which is what Gayle will do. As for me Charles asked us to make a survey to inform our practice and so that is what I will be working on. As time progresses we are still trying to find where our group sits and what roles each person will play. As of today me and Gayle are still bringing the ‘why’ into our group while Zane and Megan are more into the experimental side of things. Tomorrow we are planning on honing down on our ideas while also setting a day we can all meet twice a week as we have found with our different streams and timetables it is difficult to meet eye to eye to discuss our project.  

Below is an image of our different briefs/streams and our initial ideas. The main goal of this chart was to try and find a common interest between all our initial ideas. The one idea which I thought could fit all areas was the watch which Gayle talked about. As it has ‘Tech for good’ brief creating a project that goes towards a good cause and serves a purpose while also fitting the ‘Space + Sound’ brief where they are experimenting with sound and visuals and so the visuals will be whats seen on the watch and the sound will be playing through the thumps that interact with your hand. The idea of her watch was designed for deaf people that could hear/feel sentences through the thumps on your hand. Depending on how many times or where the thump is made it makes up a sentence which will be coded for a specific word or sentence that the person will learn. This idea is really cool because it could combine all three but I’m worried that it won’t combine more of Zane and Megan's brief which is another struggle I’ve picked up on while doing this exercise. The struggle was trying to find a correlation from all three area’s which we would all invest in. There were areas where we couldn’t agree on and so it was difficult finding that middle ground for all of us. 

Here’s a link to show our progress.