Team Reflection

The Design Project module has presented us with a challenge to step out of our comfort zone and unleash our creativity. As we had not previously collaborated on any projects, our primary task was to establish a shared mental model and promote effective communication and teamwork to focus on and execute the project successfully. Fortunately, we achieved this through the implementation of a team contract, which helped us overcome our differences in mental models and facilitated open and constructive communication, enabling us to support one another throughout the project.

In the context of the Curio project, gathering user requirements and understanding the challenges they faced was crucial. This understanding allowed us to identify areas for improvement, necessitating the expertise of team members to address various aspects, including hardware and software constraints. To address these challenges, we adopted a design thinking approach, which involved empathizing with users, defining the problem, generating innovative solutions, creating prototypes, and conducting testing with users.

Throughout the process, we iteratively developed multiple prototypes of the Curio, incorporating inputs from our partners during weekly pitches and feedback sessions. This iterative approach ensured that we remained on the right track toward achieving the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We encountered several challenges during the prototype design phase, requiring us to learn from each iteration and build upon previous designs to make steady progress towards the MVP.

An integral aspect of our project was grasping the philosophical goals of Curio. We focused on retaining and elevating these goals, especially concerning affordability. To achieve this, we proposed sustainability through the use of recycled materials. Furthermore, considering that the Curio was intended to facilitate undergraduate students' programming learning, we suggested a versatile design. This design allowed students to explore their imagination freely and construct various projects using sample templates and tutorial videos, such as a rover and battle bot, available on our website as guidance.

Despite the time constraints for building prototypes, we effectively communicated our ideas and collaborated with students from other teams to gather their input and enhance our designs. This collaborative effort not only helped us reach our goals but also instilled confidence in our ability to experiment and push the boundaries of our imagination. As evidenced by the success of our Curio project, we were able to overcome the limitations of the original Curio design through our newly developed approach.

Another challenge was the miscommunication we have with our partners. As we were showing more sketches of the prototypes rather than the actual prototypes in action in our weekly pitch video, it might have led them to think that we were still in the early stages in our design while we kept such prototype testing and etc on our blog that we update regularly. The feedback we recieved were concerning to the team where we worried that we might have drift off from the goals of achieving the MVP that might not please our partners. Nonetheless, after responding to the feedbacks and meeting with our partner in person, we were able to clarify the doubts and concerns that both ends were facing and the realisation that we were in the right direction with a little update. This was a good learning point for the team where on top of maintaining the communication between team members, it is essential to ensure partners are updated constantly on changes and recieve feedbacks so that such occurances does not happen. We also checked with the other team, Team10A on their approach where they have established the tendancy of sending emails on top of updating the daillies to the partners so that its very unlikely for them to miss updates on the progress on the project. Moreover, given the time duration of weekly pitch video, we should have focused on discussing the prototypes including videos of it in action and use the blogs to reply to the feedback instead of using the video to address them. This were important learning lessons that the team learnt and will ensure to exercise more caution in updating its partners on progress for future projects.

In conclusion, the Design Project module has been a valuable experience for our team, empowering us to explore beyond our comfort zones and embrace creativity. Through effective teamwork, user-focused design, and iterative prototyping, we were able to achieve our goals and develop an innovative solution for the Curio project.