#learning-process

Week 3 brings with it a chance for fresh development! and also a closing deadline for our statement of need…

After our first Tuesday lecture of the week Andy closed up at about 1140 giving us time to have a brief team meeting and to work on finalising our Statement of Need. Its hard to tell if i was in a bad mood, or if i just wanted things to move a bit faster but i must admit i was feeling a little bit negative about the whole project. The problem wasn’t with the content or detail we were exploring or with the members of my group (in fact i am especially happy with my group!); but rather that I felt as though we were behind and we should be looking forward to our next task, User requirements rather than still scrambling around step 1 of our design brief. 

Unfortunately for myself and for the rest of my team, this mood carried through the rest of the week… 

Our Wednesday meeting provided a nice change of venue, this was our chance to discuss what had come of meeting with Mitchell and Monique’s Grandparents, the rest of the teams research and also a chance to finalise our design brief. Monique asked me to take minutes at this meeting and for future meetings, as a point of reference for our design journals. This was a very efficient period where we discussed problem areas from motion (Big and Small), eye sight and how these actually make people feel excluded from everyday society.

One issue in Particular that Monique’s grandparents faced, was actually simple tasks like putting on socks or stockings. This is something that we take for granted as it is a task we undertake 2-3 times a day and i never would have thought of without actually talking to someone struggling with movement. This helped us define our focus to specifically oblique movements such as lifting and reaching. 

As i stated earlier however my mood was not desirable over the week and so when we arrived in the lab to start looking at our user requirements and felt that we were taking steps backwards i started to get a bit frustrated. To reiterate, it was not a problem that i had inherently with any of the team members or with our content but just the threat of falling behind looming over the hour that it took us to make a decision. 1 Hour into the lab we decided to focus on the Sock issue that Monique’s grandparents had, and wrote our statement of need.

“People who find it difficult to put socks on due to pain, strength, co-ordination, or range of motion need a solution to put on and take off socks”

Once we had surpassed the point of choosing our statement of need, everything seemed to ease off and ideas began to flow again, the User requirements came easily even though they are unfinished as of me writing this. I will put more about the user requirements when they are finished in my next blog post.