Good start, bad end

Today was another busy day.On the planning was an EduCie meeting and a brainstorm session with my project mates. While I had little time for research the past week, I conducted some extra in the morning to use in the afternoon. Reading articles was not something my state of mind was ready for in the morning, so I decided to work more visualized. As it is the goal to create a creative workplace, I searched for images of those on the internet, printed them and marked the good/bad points of it on a big piece of paper. This resulted in the picture below.

The analysis gave me good insights in the unused moments of play and the static and straight-forward actions that are being conducted within 'normal offices'. Having all those straight lines makes me want to combine the static actions with an abstract layer.

The EduCie meeting was interesting and while I cannot say too much about it, the activity we are currently focusing on in very nice and very different from previous year. I am already excited!

I did not even have time for my sandwhiched or the next brainstorm already was about to start. The idea was to go brainstorming together with the project-group, but Mariette thought it was a better idea to have a group-discussion first, about our findings during the research. She definitely had a valid point, as we all conducted research the previous days.

The discussion was about a number of interesting things that we found out. For me it was also a moment of finding out what the research I conducted could add to my process. I clearly saw a connection between the first chapter of 'Homo Ludens' by J. Huizinga en a ted.com talk by Tim Brown (the powerful link between creativity and play). Huizinga says that playing has three main characteristics:

- it is played voluntarily

- it needs rules

- it is within a given moment and a given time.

Tim Brown had said during his talk  something like: 'We need rules to break the rules'. I think that creating these rules, within a creative workplace is a good starting perspective for my final concept. This, in combination with the workplace-analysis has lifted me out of my 'idea/concept-dip'. I think, to quote Bob Marley and many others, that everything is gonna be all right!

After the discussion, Bruno, Jelmer and I did have a short brainstorm on 'how to keep things interesting'. This subject was chosen because it is necessary to keep things interesting, to keep being inspiring with our ideas. We threw around the whiteboard marker to force each other to add something to the mindmap. This worked pretty good to get this started and after this, the discussion started to flow naturally. Having a set time for the brainstorm works really good, as I also found out during the brainstorm with the other project group which Sam coaches. The brainstorm resulted in the following picture:

Bottomline, what we concluded t is that things need to be different/changing (think of breaking patterns). This was not a real surprise, but nonetheless it is a good dimension to take into account with my concepts.

In the afternoon I tried to finish the LED-controller for the Alice- box, but I did something wrong while soldering, so I need to take a second look at it. It feels like a waist of time, but of course I did learn about electronics and programming.