This week might be the hottest week in the whole exchange period. 23rd July is the Great Heat in 24 solar term. The temperature reached almost 40 degree. On my way to Yueya Building from hostel, I always felt my feet were burned by the hot ground. Compared to the summer in Hangzhou, I had to admit that the Singapore’s summer was quite cool and comfortable. One of my team members was tanned so obviously that I did recognize him at the first meeting after a recess week.
In such a hot weather, our team approached to the tough time of our project. After a recess week, we chose two ideas and divided into two small groups. One group was focus on the smart calendar which can get the emotion and feeling of the user by affective computing and increase the interaction between family members. The second group was making a smart scale in kitchen to help the beginner cooks and gym-goer to cook their dishes better and form healthy diet style.
The final presentation was less than 1 month away. We tried to increase our efficiency and complete our project smoothly. We almost had meetings with our teaching assistant everyday to check our process with her. Based on her suggestions and other researches, we redefined our problem and redesigned our final solutions many times. It was totally another 3.007 design course with less time but higher standard.
To make our products functions and using process clear to understand, some of us made a lot of journey maps and activity diagrams. We also tried some new software to design our product. For example, we used Adobe XD to make different types of App pages and use different modelling software to build the 3D model of our projects. Most of time, our product’s models were rejected by our TA because she was really picky. Even though, we felt a little bit depressed, we still need to keep improving our products on our own. 
Some of us also practiced a lot of communication skills with staffs of Taobao to ask for invoices. It was troublesome. The way of asking for a claim was quite different from SUTD. Instead of just preparing for the receipts well, we need to ask for invoices in China. However, most of the Taobao stores will not provide invoice because the total price of our goods was so low (within 100 RMB). Some of them will provide us only if we pay extra money which cannot be claimed by the invoice. We had to communicate with the staffs on Taobao in Chinese and sometimes, their vague statements really drove me crazy. The instructions of our professor were also not very clear, so sometimes we were also confused about whether we could ask for a claim or not.
I was sure that our skills of using photoshop, illustrator, adobe XD and model software had been trained in these days and made great progress. Time was really limited, here I will not share too much. Hope we could give a nice presentation at the final showcase and end our exchange trip well.
