Week 4 – Iterations On Our Iterations

Quarter’s

Walkarounds

This week was the ETC’s Quarters, meaning we had faculty walk around to each project in groups of 2-3 to listen to our progress to provide feedback and advice. We got a lot of sound advice and a lot of fair confusion during our talks. The first few groups had trouble understanding the event and what we were creating. This is mostly due to our failure to communicate that clearly. Using feedback from these first few groups we were able to refine the way we think and talk about the event, which made the rest of Quarters easier on us and the faculty. Once we dug past that, much of the feedback boiled down to reaffirming that we need to start recruiting as soon as possible. One interesting note that came up was a question of IP. As CMU students, we own the IP of our work. However, as participants in a CMU sponsored event, our attendees would also own their IP. This is something we will be looking into in the next week. Some of the faculty who are more experienced with event planning and experience design came to speak with us at Quarters Sitdowns as well.

Sitdowns

Sitdowns is a time later in the week for particularly interested faculty to come back for some more prolonged advice. We met with Ruth Comley and Shirley Saldamarco for Sitdowns. From these meetings we got advice as to how to think about events in a new way. We were told to think of our goals for the semester, the event, and the experience as separate entities and deal with them as such. We were also glad to hear the feedback of how the ChairJam event sounds to the faculties and their keen interest to tracking our recruitment process which we will focus on next week.

Finalizing ChairJam materials

This week we also finished finalizing our ChairJam branding materials. This meant we could start recruitment, which, of course, is one of the most important steps of the event. We were constantly working with our faculty advisors and clients to assess the feedback of our latest PR materials to tweak the layout, design, and text issues. The application form together with fliers are ready to be sent out to specialists from different areas.

Brainstorming

With branding materials mostly down, we also started brainstorming different prototypes we could showcase during the event. Whatever prototypes we make are meant to convey our basic vision of the the type of products we expect from the event. We brought up several ideas and discussed the reasons of why each could be potentially useful for the event. We narrowed it down to the idea of painting a trail behind a wheelchair, sort of as an artistic experience or even gamified in interesting ways. We also liked the idea of using wheelchair as an input device in a VR experience. We are curious how such a thing would interact with motion sickness issues. We will try to settle down an idea and start prototyping next week.

Talking to the Specialists

This week we also talked to Sabrina Culyba, a specialist in game jam organization, and Catherine Getchell, CMU’s Director of Disability Resources.

Sabrina Culyba has a lot of experience hosting events of this nature, such as the XR Brain Jam at Games for Change and Pittsburgh’s Global Game Jam. We talked through several approaches for team building and recruiting. The idea of having the team get together before the Jam even starts was discussed, as well as various in-jam team formation exercises like having participants pitch their ideas to each other and self-select which they wanted to work on. Aside from this, she also shared a handful of contacts that we may want to reach out to for PR and recruiting, such as Bit Bridge, Pittsburgh IGDA, and Schell Games.

Catherine Getchell gave us her take on our work and a few contacts that may be useful as well. The biggest takeaway from the talk was that our venue, 407 S Craig St, is not as good as we’d thought. To be clear, we didn’t think it was ideal to begin with. But, Catherine was vehemently against the space. She is concerned with narrow passages, the relative lack of handicapped bathroom stalls, and generally tight spaces. She recommended that we look elsewhere for venues. That’s a big note we will have to tackle next week.