6//april//2009//week 6//lecture

We got back our results for the reports. We did really bad for this assignment the only good we can take from this is that all other groups did as bad as we did. That was not an excuse though. We really had to step up in order to do well. I'm a very results oriented person and thus this served as a motivation. We sat down straight after talking to Marie, Stephen and Dekker. We went through what went wrong and what went right? What needed changes? After consulting the tutors we came to an agreement that we were still not focused enough. We were still attempting to do too much and the class still did not understand where we were heading for. We needed to focus on just 1 portion of the room.

After discussing we decided that we needed to focus on just 1 portion of the room and we came to a conclusion that we would be doing a SmartFrame. The SmartFrame would be just a frame sitting on the wall but instead of displaying just a picture, there would be a monitor embedded behind which would display the energy consumption for the month. It acts as an application to monitor and keep track of how much energy the household is consuming. Which applicance is using the most energy. How are u faring in comparison to the neighbourhood.

The main part of this project is not the reflection of the energy consumption in numerical data. It's the metaphorical representation using the solar system and a planet to represent your household. The higher the consumption the bigger and the brighter the red of the planet gets. The lesser the consumption the smaller and green the planet looks. This could be further expanded into using the solar system to represent the entire neighbourhood. We decided on using planets as a metaphorical representation instead of the energy tree cause we got feedback that it was too common. We too agreed about that and thus we brainstormed and came to the conclusion. We all felt good about it and distributed the task before heading off to complete each task before the next meeting next week.

Next week was the mid semester break and we knew we the importance of allocating tasks to individual members. We would most probably be meeting once during the mid semester break to check on how everyone is going. This mid semester break would prove to be the crucial part of the prototype.

cwcw