Surprises and Wrapping Up
What is a good story without a plot twist? Boring.
I’m happy to report that Team Far Out is far from boring! The past sprint brought another twist in focus, our story is picking up steam and moving toward a conclusion — which is lucky for us, as we’ve spent the past sprint parsing out a narrative telling the story of our research activities, insights, and design opportunities.
While we pivoted our focus (yet again), this time we have spelled out justifications, done additional interviews to verify we’re on the right track, and feel confident in our new, narrowed direction. So what is this focus that is going to guide us through the rest of this semester and the summer? We’re taking a close look at milestone reviews — the points along the process of SLS development when representatives from each team get together to present the work they’ve completed and make sure everybody is on track.
A key issue with getting work to “done” in SLS development is teams’ mismatched assumptions when designing. Discipline teams work steadily, believing they are making significant progress — until they get into the room for a milestone review. At this point, misconceptions and misalignments come to light, and teams realize they wasted time doing incompatible work. Having to redo work that’s already been done is demoralizing, frustrating, and also expensive.
Team Far Out thinks this is an incredible design opportunity. The need for collaboration and communication tools is clear and we were able to begin exploring a wide range of solution concepts with a creative matrix. For those unfamiliar, creative matrixes push you out of your comfort zone to think more creatively and expansively. As a team, we wrote several “How Might We” statements (e.g. How Might We make design more collaborative? How might we help engineers understand how their work integrates with the whole?) and then challenged ourselves to solve each HMW with a game, a mobile app, a service solution, a conversational interface, and so on and so forth.
While we don’t think any of these ideas will be our final solution, it was a fun exercise that opened our eyes to the opportunities and benefits of concepts beyond a traditional computer screen dashboard, like a word game to reconcile vocabulary differences or a rocket that can be toured in virtual reality. Additionally, this exercise helped us identify remaining questions around milestone reviews that we were able to answer with interviews with our NASA contacts.
We’re working hard to continue pushing our project forward, but it’s also the end of the semester meaning a lot of Team Far Out’s time has been invested in synthesis activities. We’re developing a presentation to present to our peers and NASA clients; a website (be on the lookout for a link!) detailing our research activities, insights and design work; and creating detailed prototypes to carry us into the summer months.
There is only ONE sprint left before we leave our home base of Carnegie Mellon and head to NASA’s Ames Center in Mountain View for the summer! Keep an eye out for our final synthesis of the semester and sunnier skies ahead!
