Trapped at Hyper

We are 12 students from DM10STO that are going to meet and discuss the YLVP students ideas. Their assignment is to "...develop a concept and prototype for a social media service/solution to be released in year 2010." In this stage they are to have come up with 5 ideas that we are going to listen to and give feedback on. Then they're going to continue their work and narrow it down to one.

Anyhow, I shot a few pictures of our international students for the new recruitment tour. This is how one of them came out at the Reform & Revolution web page.

From the left: Byron Castro Cerda, Anne Mee Küther, Cecilie Lund Madsen, Ina Johansen and Frederico Philips.

Pretty neat, huh? You can read the article by Reform & Revolution here, or read Ina's blog post on the article here.

I haven't had the time or energy to blog anything specific on the ET08 exhibition. I was in the Press group (part of the Exhibition group) and wrote the press release, invitations etc. 

There was a lot of nervousness for the upcoming exhibition, and the peak was when we at the day of the exhibition stood without a prototype. The computer running electricity to our Micomico took a trip to Skåne, and we couldn't get the program to work on my Macbook. After a very very long time we got help from another groups technician and I was able to go to lunch. When I had just paid and was aiming for the fabolous lunch buffé I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was the Lars Kagg-students who were standing in the lobby, waiting for me to show them around and guide them to the exhibition. 

PANIC!

I desperatly tried to reach the Exhibition groups project manager, Erik Öhlen, to get him to guide them. I had no idea that I was supposed to do it and didn't want to waste that lunch. Cheap as a student can get! I reached Erik and he said it was no problem, so I relaxed.

When back in school I got the lovely news that Mico was up and running and ready for exhibition. Soon thereafter I was filmed by a team that was making iterviews about the projects. My group wanted me to present Micomico, and I gladly did it!

Then the exhibition started, and people started pouring in! I had never expected there to be so many right at the opening! I didn't have time to stay for the whole exhibition since I was going to the Starbreeze 10 year anniversary, so I had to drop out on another filming on the projcet (this time on taking on an uncomfortable role in the group). But I told co-worker Micke that Anders would be better for the job, and the problem solved easily.

I ran off to the central station without having the time to try out all the projects, and would probably have missed the train to Uppsala because of the queue to the ticket machines if the train hadn't been late. Lucky me!

The anniversary party was great fun. A lot of people were a bit blue because 77 employees at Avalanche had been terminated, but everyone was still in a party mood, and soon the discussions on who should hire who began!

Unfortunatly the last train for Stockholm departures at 11:09pm, so we were quite the gang that had to miss the rest of the party. 

Still, at home, I was satisfied and quite tired... but of course I didn't get to bed until several hours later.

This picture was taken before the dinner by UNT:

From the left: Magdalena Piechal (me), Sofia Göker, Joakim Hellstedt, Björn Albihn, Alvar Pernroth and Nilo Kabotea.

Read the article here. Funny thing, they didn't catch a single Starbreeze employee on this picture!

Viveca Ljungdahl

Nicklas Högberg

Today has me and Anders been making the "foot" of Mico and the foreground to our superb sign.
We were located in the garbage room, so the smell wasn't that nice but the results were much nicer.

It is now 2 days left for the first exhibition and 3 to the final and big one, I'm really looking forward to see all the cool projects my classmates and the students from Karlskrona has been working on.

Mico is almost ready for the show, but today we stumbled over a problem. Tobias is going to Skåne on friday and we are running Mico on his computer. We need a mac computer to make the code and the arduino to communicate with flash. So tomorrow we have to ask some gentle soul so lend us his/hers mac computer, or else make the Arduino2Flash work for PC.
Well i'm not nervous, the problem will be solved.

Here is some pictures from the building of the foot and the sign, take care. / Nicklas

We got the microphone to work (thanx Emilia), the material for the sign is arriving monday and Magdalena is going to try an alternative solution for the eyes this weekend so today we devoted time to construct the Mico web-page. The sofware still needs to be adjusted but Toby doesn´t seem to be worried so I guess it´s cool. I´m looking forward to assemble MicoMico next week and to get down and dirty with preparing the sign.
Ok, I´m out of stuff to write about! It´s raining outside, my classmates are crazy from Friday-frenzy and I am dying for a glass of wine.

Well, now it´s time for me to do some real work and then go home.

Auf Wiedersehen, Nach Hause Gehen...

Tobias Ahlin

Viveca Ljungdahl

13:th of October, 2008, at 6:00pm 

At the start of this day I really felt low. My train was late, so I had to run when switching in Slussen, and then! The coffee machine at Pressbyrån at Telefonplan was out of order! Today was the busiest day this far, and whoaa! was I grumpy when having to begin at 9am with a process meeting without coffee. At the meting we filled out a form on how we feel about the project, our roles, the group and so on. I was happy to see that the whole group was happy about the group and the way we treat each other. What I think we were, or at least I know I was, surprised of was that no one in the group was very hppy with their assigned role. So we discussed this and how we can change it. After the process meeting I simply had to get someting to eat, so we had a break and then sat down in our cosy fatboys and went through the liist of roles that we had, the ones we needed and finally which ones we wanted. This is how the new list turned out: Nicklas: Project leader, responsible for the exhibition Tobias: Tutor, Art Director and software technician Magdalena: Hardware technician, web design, responsible for the budget Viveka: Software technician, writer, web design and designer Anders: Hardware technician, purchaser and designer The meeting was great. Everyone is open and speaks their mind, but still listens to each other, so finding and assigning the new roles was no trouble at all. I'm really curious what this module, group, project and class would look like if we had not done the UGL course and teambuilding before starting school. Mayhem? Maybe! After the meeting however, everyone felt refreshed and ready for a new start. So we went to lunch! After lunch me and Karin had a short meeting with Micke, asking some of the questions that came up during our work in the Press group. Micke gave us the feedback that it was nice to see that we are so ambitious about the exhibition and take so much responsibility for our education. After this meeting me and Karin went straight to tthe Exhibition group meeting. Why, the only thing I did today was sit in meetings! In the exhibition group we discssed everyones progress in the sub groups; what our goals and deadlines are, what we would need help with and so on. It feels really good to be in this group. As Micke said, we're really ambitious, and working in a group where everyones level of ambition is the same and we're all eager and want to work hard to achieve the same goal. Before returning to work with my project group me and Karin had a skype meeting with the press group from Karlskrona, and we shared with them what we discussed on the previous meeting and other press related issues. At this point I was getting tired, restless and in desperate need of fresh air. So after the meeting with press group I had a well deserved break before entering the next meeting. This time it was a meeting with my project group, The Arduio Bullys! We had a creative meeting and made a list of everything needed to be done, assigned the tasks to group members and finally set deadlines for everything on the list. At the start of this day I really felt low, but the mood just went straight up during the day. Even though having only meetings is a bit straining on your concentration skills I felt alive enough to cook 1.6kilograms of minced meat when coming home!

10:th of October, 2008, at 3:44pm 

9:th of October, 2008, at 5:11pm 

8:th of October, 2008, at 5:14pm 

We were very disciplined today and came to school at nine o'clock to continue our Arduino bullying. Right now everything feels good, we have some shopping to do and some coding to check into but after that we're good to go. Im really excited to get to work and see how our idea will develop as we go. Right now I'm mostly worried about time, malfunctioning technical devices and other problems that might occur on our at the moment clear blue sky. Erik Sjödin from Interactive Institute were here and held a lecture aswell, and at the end we were able to ask him some questions and make some things we've been puzzled by a bit clearer and get some tips which was very nice of him. I'm still a bit dazzled by the Arduino, I mean there is so much you can do with it! I want to do it all. I'm such a rookie on tech things though. Anyway, back to work now;)

7:th of October, 2008, at 4:30pm 

Today has truly been a day with a rich content. First up the day started with a lecture by Ellen Sundh from Great Works, she showed us gadgets she'd made and had a introduction of arduino. After this we sat down in the group and started brainstorming again, this time with a good result. We all decided on one of the ideas and started to work immediately. Everyone is quite tired now but we have done a lot today, a very detailed schedule has been done that's overlapping the whole project time, we've written a "to buy" list that's hopefully going to be bought tomorrow, done the project plan and published it and Tobias and Viveca has beginning to look at some arduino coding. I'm very positive that this project is going to be a success and also looking forward to start working on this. Over and out / Nicklas

6:th of October, 2008, at 4:00pm

Experience the creative forces of group number seven! Or, as we'd like to call ourselves; The Arduino Bullys. Today first we had a short introduction to the big task for this module, and after that we had a lecture with Ronald Jones. The lecture was on collaboration and integration between different faculties, companies etc. After the lecture and lunch we sat down in the group and started brainstorming. We've come up with some brilliant ideas, and some lesser ones. Still, we haven't found anything that's interesting, creative or cool enough for us to feel like we want to give the idea our focus and start with the project plan. We went through some of the exercises that we learned from 370 Degrees last week, but we're sitting here in one of the cells and are still working on our ideas. What we have done is that we've assigned each goup member a role in the project. Nicklas is the group leader, Tobias is responsible for the tech, Viveca is his assistant. Anders is our secretary and responsible for documentation and I am the art director and hence responsible for organising the design. It may seem that we didn't achieve anything at all, but during the last hour we really put our minds to it and decided on some practical issues not related to the project as in what it shoud be. As the arduino is completely new to me I just feel overwhelmed by the possibilities and limitations within the technology and my knowledge. Oh yeah, we're also to keep a group blog on the project. So I'll be posting everyones blog posts here!