For my Project 3 Design Research I chose the squad “Connecting realities”. The squad was separated over two clients; Designhuis and Effenaar and I took part in the Effenaar part of the squad. The squad defines their primary design and research areas as the following: social computing, social interaction and transformations, everyday experiences, linking between the virtual and the physical, the opportunity and challenge brought up by connecting the web of people and the internet of things, and the related cultural and societal issues.
From the introduction that was given I expected to learn about AR programming and apply that in (multiple) prototype design(s) to gain the answer to our research question. Through this I expected to be focusing mostly on the Math, Data and Computing and the Technology and Realization, which were also quoted in the course description.
At the start of the project we had some issues on getting a clear concept. We jumped from one concept to the other and had hard time coming up with something that fit with both the squad and the client. We had a lot of brainstorming sessions which took away a lot of time. Especially at the end of the project we had the feeling we should have done certain parts of the process earlier on. From this I learned that a research project really needs some clearly stated deadlines, set by the group. It would have also been good if we used more of the taught designing techniques from other courses. By using these techniques, we might have had a better framework to keep our efficiency high.
For the expertise area Technology and Realization, I was able to add a new tool to my toolkit; Unity 3D. In the project I was able to create the prototypes for both the mid-term demo day and the final demo day. This helped me increase my programming skills, which I will be able to use in my future projects.
Since there were not that many papers on our particular subject, we had to dive deep into literature research. This was a big part of what we have done this project, which is also very clear in our paper. In the literature research I was able to develop my understanding of communities and group dynamics. From this I improved the expertise User and Society.
One of the nicest things of working in this project team, was that we were almost always on the same wavelength. We all had the same goals and motivations to accomplish a well done research project. This really helped in working together.