MA Interactive Multimedia @ Bath Spa University

7 Deadly Sins Project: Evaluation & Reflection

The second group project for the PGDip was shared by all students on both the remaining IMM and Interaction Design programmes.
To me the question beforehand was whether this would make an impact on the way this project would run and if it would be any different from the Usability Group project in terms of teamwork,communication and mutual inspiration.

Ironically I found although this group was double the size and people from different courses with different mindsets had to work together, it worked better in terms of teamwork and communication.

E-Mails were always promptly answered and there was a clear segregation of duties on one hand but also a collaborative dynamic throughout the project.
Individuals’ preferences were taken into account e.g. a group member not wishing to participate on MySpace which did not to do the overall outcome any harm.

I also don’t feel that me being based in Germany had a detrimental effect on my work for this project (apart from not being there for the installation set up which I did compensate with some extra work), via the E-Mail/MySpace communication and during my vists to Bath I’d like to see myself as a valuable member of the team who also brought many ideas to the table.

After an initial brainstorming session immediately after the brief was handed out with all team members it became clear that, especially as this was a 50% project, anything requiring a high level of technical/software or programming skills would not be achievable and in a way I found this quite liberating because this gave a conceptual slant to a University project which forced us to think about the blurring boundaries between the real (or what is generally regarded as such) world and the virtual online world(s) of Web 2.0.

Although the sin (and virtue) was pot luck I had the impression everybody enjoyed their actions being determined by a sin and personally speaking I did feel a little like Tim Dingman after a while.

While researching into his sin envy I came across many interesting pointers where envy plays a role in art,music history and popular culture.
I tried to make my character’s social background background,actions and interactions with the other virtual project members, the design of his social network on MySpace and the layout of the page itself relevant to this without being too obvious.
The MySpace avatar is a character called envy from a Japanese series called Full Metal Alchemist,which only insiders would know. I also set up a dedicated E-Mail account for Tim on gmail to add another realistic note to his character.

The main interaction  took place with his character adversary Graham (aka greed aka Adrian) which was really fun as you can see in the dialogues documented on this blog, Susan (pride/Mike) whom he developed a fancy for at the party and Irena (Penny), Susan’s sister with whon Tim shares similar ethics and who is useful to him with regards to finding out about the feelings of her sister.

As I could not be present for the final installation I made an extra effort in providing a few more artifacts in agreement with the other team members for the mock police office, being particularly concerned about the realistic look and feel of these elements.
I thoroughly researched into these fields e.g studying the Metropolitan Police’s Corporate Design guidelines and although technical skills were not particularly needed for the project I feel the installation benefited from my previous DTP skills.

I feel the overall outcome is a good achievement and an original concept well executed ,given the amount of time,weighting and other projects (not to mention work commitments etc.).

There would be many ways of making a similar project even better but this in my eyes would justify a 100% project (as we can see in the Netherlands with the school project Martin forwarded us).