I thought perhaps that having a shorter week would make this second week a little less tiring. I am not sure what I was thinking there! By the time class on Thursday came I felt like a Zombie…BWAINS!!!!! I did take advantage of the Monday off of work to get a head start on the class work for the week and that was helpful. But, staying after class each night to work on Project 1 meant the evenings are all squished together and the time with the family is limited.
I think that working in a two person team on this first project is a good idea. I think it gradually exposes us to the idea of group designing. It really is hard to come to the first meeting without any ideas at all. I was glad when we started and my team member mentioned some of his ideas and they were similar to my own. It seems to me that the purpose of this project may not really be to design the best thermostat, but to learn how to work together, use personas and usability testing to do the design process.
It isn’t that I don’t want to design the best thermostat EVER, but I guess I am mostly focusing on following the loose process given and trying to get the most out of all these tools – sketching, personas, tests, etc. It also seems like we are being given a process in disguise…that it exists but if we make the whole project about the process then we loose some creative opportunities.
My undergrad was in Mathematics and Music, and I have always sort of teeter tottered between the right and left brain….the chaos and the order. I like that this class is not explicitly giving you a design process that you have to follow, but that it is giving you a set of tools that helps you to generate good (great) designs. A few years ago I took an Instructional Design course from the School of Education. It was very structured in determining what was included in a design process and documentation. Although that really satisfied my urge to have a list to check off, I don’t think that we got the most creativity out of our team members that we could have if the process was a little more loose.
Tomorrow I get to spend some time in a class for Adobe Flash Catalyst and the Colts NFL season begins. I think minus one little girl’s ear infection life would be pretty fantastic. On a lighter note, Charlie is working on sitting up by himself and Zoe is learning how to wash her hands. 
