May. 19, 2010 at 2:02pm with 13 notes
Summary of last week’s crits

Meeting with Sadhna Thursday 13 May

With Sadhna we discussed the following scenarios:
How you would book crit rooms and how many members should be in each crit?
Should the crits be with random members or could you invite members to based on similar fields of interest?
In what other ways could the crit rooms be used, should we arrange online exhibitions or talks?
We also talked about how we could store past crits so that members could re-visit recorded crits to access information.
Further we talked about what kind of system will need to be implemented to store the crits in a database on the website, agreeing that we would we need to implement a tagging system so that members could easily access information wanted. We discussed how storing information from each crit could make one big transcript or a big online scrapbook to browse.
How could you save your workspace in a crit and come back to the crit at a later time?
How long should a crit last? Is this something the potential host of the crit decides when inviting other members to the crit and they all decide on this together? For example if you had one hours worth of crit time you would have a stopwatch so that each member got his or her 15 minutes.
We also discussed how and who could become a member of the website.
Sadhna also talked about the role of the tutor, the dynamics of the website and the psychology behind the navigation.
We were also told to look at other collaborative tools currently available, which led us to discussing how internet poker rooms work.
We talked about how we could push the crit further with features such as being able to instantly draw and how we could visualize brainstorming.
We asked as ourselves what would be our ideal crit?
We also discussed how we could turn crits into immediately producing work and Sadhna talked about having crits in different physical environments, like for example staging a crit in a library which means you would have instant access to books, would it make a difference? From there the idea of synchronised browsing within the crit room window came about, we could have a crit within Google books or even a walk about in Google street view.

Last words from Sadhna were that we should always grow something from a core. The core being first and foremost our year group.

We came to the conclusion that our main tasks would be to:

Come up with a name and branding for the website and a possible campaign.
Work on the layout and the functions of the site.
Summarize our research and start working on books to present it within.

Meeting with Amanda Thursday 13 May

With Amanda we talked about the importance of the feeling of being in the same room and how companies set up videoconference rooms in certain ways to achieve that. We also discussed the possibility of having or own time zone within the crit room, in the end we decided on keeping it to UK time. We also talked about the importance of recording information from the crits and if you somehow could flag interesting points of conversation.

Meeting with Max Thursday 13 May

By speaking to fellow students we got to know that Max runs the web interest group consisting of 2nd and 3rd year students. They have been working on a similar website which lets students on different year groups at college interact, he kindly gave us access to what they have been working on so far.
Max talked about how you would get users to come with constructive criticism, with regards to this he showed us a link to paulgraham.com/hackersnews, which explains how fellow users can avoid getting into flame wars.
He also talked about how the small details are massively important to consider when building a website and told us to start low key and always think about the worst-case scenario. Finally he seemed to agree that it would be important to support the site with live events.

Crit with Patrick Friday 14 May

With Patrick we talked about how to manifest what’s going on within the website in a physical space. Patrick suggested the idea of a growing tower in a city every time someone was in a crit-room. That got us thinking and we started to explore the idea of leaving a light bulb in college, which would glow, or flicker every time there was activity in the online space. This would later lead us to explore the idea of leaving a crit table at college, which would introduce and remind new members/students to our growing community.

Meeting with Max Tuesday 18 May

Today we showed Max our layout so far.
1: We started of talking about how members would sign up for the site, one idea was to use the facebook sign in app but we decided it would be better to follow the University’s own lists of members so that we wouldn’t have to search through facebook to find members as the would already be using the University’s email address.
2: In your user profile there is a link to special interest with three tags, we decided that these tags could change according to how much you commented on certain posts. Essentially your interests will change and it will be tracked to your profile.
3: How could we make the site more attractive to a college user; Max told us he wanted students to come more into College. Could we link real life college crits up to the website, record them and post them into our archive? Or even have a physical online critroom, which can be booked upon request? Think the Microsoft surface table.
4: How do you search for specific items, search in tag clouds and so on?
5: How can we capture people’s vanity? Could members unlock different features off the site and be awarded accordingly? Would it draw more people in if we set them challenges to unlock points? What could the challenges and awards be?
One example is an app called Foursquare which tracks how many times you visit an area or a shop and the person who’s been there the most times becomes the major of that place. Should we track and award the top contributors to the site?
Max told us that Yale’s Graphic design website could be constantly changed in appearance by alumni and students and that it was proved that the alumni of the University would hang around on the site more than any other alumni.
This led us to talking about TRUSTING you’re to users and how Wikipedia works.  In Wikipedia everyone one can add content and it works because it’s easier to make right than to make it wrong. It would make the site last longer if it was more user supported. Max also recommended a book called Here Comes Everybody by Clay Sherkey.
Could this be supported by an Iphone app?
6: We also talked about creating a difficult user case scenario to show how the site would work.
7: Finally would members go there if the site was empty from the start? What content can already be there? The solution to this would be to kick of the building of the database with information from the third year show and this years alumni will first gain access. CSM students will gain access as soon as the new school year started.
8: Finally we should deliver the final piece in QuickTime or most ideally on a DVD.

What we are doing/producing:

Building a website proposal.
Making books of our separate research and research done together.
Creating a physical campaign to raise awareness of website.

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