Week 8

Design sprint

Following to the 3-day "design sprint" workshops that I attended a couple of weeks ago, I went to the presentations to see what the designers came up with during the sprint. This was in central London, in the same building a 6Music which was exciting.

UCL workshop

Showed the proof-of-concept work we've been doing. We had lots of ideas about how we could package and present the sensors to our participants and there was a general discussion about which sensors we should include. For example, accelerometer and gyroscopes tend to be very sensitive and difficult to mentally reason about due to the axes of data they can sense: 3 axes of movement and velocity. But you can use them to create higher-level events such as "lift", "shake" or "turn".

How you link physical sensor action to radiodan actions also came up. One of the ideas was to create a simple IFTTT-style interface for configuration via a web app. This is something that's easy to do using radiodan.

We're gong to start planning the workshop in more detail at the next meeting, until them I'm continuing to connect every sensor that I have in my study at home which is a great test bed for actually using them.

Walls Have Eyes

The three of us met in London to spend two days trying to get everything up and running. It was a bit chaotic and stressful but we managed to get it working by the end. Fixed some issues along the way. Gave me a chance to put my project management hat on again. I think I'm probably quite good at figuring out what the next thing to do is. I'm less good at actually doing those things when on my own.

Hen

A close friend had a surprise wedding last year. The surprise was for all the guests, she knew about the wedding. Because of the surprise, someone organised a hen party for her and apparently I'd previously demanded an invite. It sounds unlikely. It was a fun afternoon, featuring: pies, pints, cocktail making, walking to a pub, eating and drinking. Fun!

Walk to the reservoirs

One of the great things about living in Clapton is that I'm actually really near to loads of green space. From parks like Hackney Downs to the Hackney Marshes. To deal with post-hen hangover, we walked along the canal up the Lower Lee Valley to Tottenham Hale. Bounded by marsh and parkland on one side and private and social housing developments on the other, the canal filled with swans and other birdlife. Just meters away up the roads perpendicular from the canal are busy roads and dense urban buildings and it's incredible how close you are from these serene landscapes you can be.