Week 1
Day 2
Today was the second day of Entre. It felt kind of weird because I started out the day with AP Spanish and Stats and we didn't actually start Entre until the afternoon. Obviously this is unavoidable because this is still school and we need to take all of our classes but there is just so much to do I wish could have had the full day. Today we met our client Findaway World. As it turns out I have heard of the Playaway before, I used to see it all the time on the CleveNet website and always thought it was a cool product but I never used it. I love audiobooks so I may look into getting one from the library in the futre. My group (Alex, Hannah, and Eliza) was assigned to running a social media campaign for Bookopotamus which is Findaway World's app for making charitable donations of audiobooks to schools. It works the same way as Free Rice website that the United Nations has set up where they more you play the more you donate. Some of the ideas that came up in my group and in the discussion with Dean Skinner was possibly adding specific regions the user chooses to donate to (like in Charitable Miles) also adding specific categories of books. I've already got some of my friends to download the app and they enjoy it, it really is a lot of fun. My group talked a lot about doing some sort of partnership with the middle school to get them to use this app and possibly getting extra credit for the donating the most in the class. I think one of the social media sites our group may focus on is Tumblr because it has not been used in Findaway World's marketing yet. As someone who uses Tumblr I know that if a product, especially one that donates to those in need, gets to the right person it will be circulated around the world. I wonder if Findaway World has considered making Bookopotamus into a website where the sell ad space because even though it may not be as accessible it will allow more children and possibly older people to play.
I chose this blog post because it was the second blog post I ever wrote and I feel like it has some of the awkwardness I felt in the beginning of the class and how little I knew about starting out this project.
Week 3
Day 1- Design Reflection
Today we did something really cool. We had to create products that solved a problem that we chose randomly using 3 tools that were also given to us randomly. My first team that had Meredith, Ali, Alex and myself were presented with the problem that we couldn’t keep food cold and we had to solve the problem with yarn, straws, and cardboard. Are team did not realize that the cardboard tube that we picked up did not count as our cardboard and we actually had to take cardboard and shape it into what we wanted. This caused us problems because we only realized this with 5 minutes to spare so we had to take apart our original design and remake it with the cardboard. It looked much sleeker with the tube but all in all I think it worked out well. What we created ended up being the “Over the Shoulder Cold Food Holder” which was a cardboard container that used straws filled with frozen water to keep the food cold and yarn on the outside to insulate. The second time around my group was Zach, Henry, and Olivia and our problem was we needed something to wipe our noses with and our tools were foil, a cloth, and a tool of our choice (we picked yarn). Henry was apart of another group (Mammoth Ears) previously and we saw that what we were trying to make was very similar to what we had already created. So with the permission from one of the other Mammoth Ear inventors we took what they had created and added our cloth to it to create a hands free cloth tissue. We had a lot of time after we did this so we talked to Ms. Cho and she asked would Superman be able to use our product? So we added eye holes to the cloth and started working on our pitch. We decided to use the fact that we created our product from the Mammoth Ears as a pro and said that the two products we compatible. We also said that it was voted the number 1 product of the year by Forbes and that Jennifer Lawrence was wearing it at the Golden Globes. It was fun being able to create these fantastic scenarios with our product and I really did feel like I was in kindergarten when I was creating it.
I chose this blog post because in the beginning of the class we did a lot of design challenges that forced us to think more creatively than I was used to thinking before.