The one of most meaningful things I have learned from this course is collaboration. Because we had a very open topic on our project related to liveness and ambiguity. It’s not only that there are so many cool things we could build, but also when building an open topic project with collaboration there are much more ideas and opportunities to explore new things. While I was doing our project, I learned a lot of new techniques, skills, and development tools from my teammates and other classmates.
My initial ideas are very different from the project we are doing right now and it’s also different from my other two group members’ initial ideas. During our group discussions, we shared our ideas, views on the liveness and how do we make our project idea perform creatively. Then, we brain storm more ideas based on the liveness and we derive our final idea from one of the member’s idea. It’s surprised for me that we had a coincident opinion on our final idea: this is one we need! Which I think this is cool. Because when I first need to think of two initial ideas it was kind of hard, I was sitting in front my computer about an hour and there is nothing came out. However, we brain storm many good and creative ideas in about 10 minutes. The cool thing is when the first member came up some ideas the second can derive more on that and the third one can make them even better base on our different knowledge background. I think that I learned a lot on the process of collaborative creation. Even though, many of my class have group projects, this one is different. On other classes, we work together and solve problems base on what we learn from that specific class. However, on this class I can collaborate with my teammate meanwhile learn the new skills or ideas from them.
Liveness is a theme I am really interested in and I feel it can change a lot of user experience on information exchange we are having right now. When I was first time heard you introduced it in class, I was thinking how to apply it to the project. Then, I came up with a smartwatch application. Because personally, I think a small screen like smartwatch people cannot have too many interactions on them, however like notifications and real time(liveness) information display probably are more important on smartwatches. Even though, we discard the smartwatch part on our project finally due the hardware issue we cannot solve, I am still very interested in liveness on smartwatches and believe that it can give some nice user experience with live information display.