As we approach the midpoint of ALP, our workload is certainly starting to ramp up. For our theme, the product launch exhibition for DIP, the class that our theme is taking, rapidly approaching, we had to really increase our pace in order to get things done as quickly as possible. Aside from making our products a reality, we also had to prepare and rehearse for the presentation for the actual day, so it is certainly a lot of work.
Aside from our DIP projects, we are also starting to ideate for our main Augmented Human project, as well as to learn some new technical skills that we may need, including but not limited to Augmented Reality, iOS and Android programming, and database management.
Though a very good thing to come out of this is that due to the large amount of work we have to do, we are actually (albeit being forced to, but still) picking up lots of skills from these projects that we are doing, which will certainly help us in the future.
We do, thankfully, have a bit of respite from our projects. One of them would be our Design Fiction classes, which are getting more interesting by the week. For Direction I, we acted as animals this week, and it was certainly amusing to watch everyone do their best impressions of all sorts of animals from elephants to ants to flamingos. Aside from just acting as individual animals, we were also paired up randomly and told to think of a story between two animals that were assigned. This resulted in some pretty strange pairings, including a seal paired with a giraffe, and a mouse paired with a flamingo.
Some of us, with our fast fingers, also managed to secure a trip to the Yamaha factory in Hangzhou. It was certainly an eye-opening experience for all of us as although many of us were musicians, we never really put too much thought into how the instruments were made. We were all surprised to see that guitars were mostly handcrafted. It was also interesting to see the amount of care and precision needed to manufacture a piano. I guess that explains why they are so expensive.
It was a pretty cool trip and we hope to have more interesting visits like these in the future!
