Design Sprint: Planning for working fast
For the first assignment of Design 200 this year we where required to preform 3 design sprints over 4 weeks.
The first was to create a version of the AT transport app for use by your 6 year old self. The second was to create a 3d model of a toy we remembered from when we where 6 and produce a promotional poster for said toy. The third was to produce an immersive VR room with a strong narrative in Mozilla Hubs.
This was a very stressful project. Some stress from the outside: the first two weeks online due to lockdown, making it very hard to get proper feedback (especially from tutors). There where other assignments and commitments that where taking up more time at the start of the year. Other stress from the inside: I planned my time spent on each part but due to parts depending on feedback and some time spent excess on doing parts of the project that I didn’t need I lost a lot of time.
My main strategy for what time I would do the tasks was I would go through each step of the given process, looping back if needed, on each one at the same time (I.e. First Step App, then First Step Poster, then First Step VR, then Second Step App…).
If I was to do this assignment again, I would start by creating a Gantt Chart in order to track the parts that had dependencies. I would also move into prototyping much faster. I spent too much time on the Ideation phase, and while on the App that did pay off, if I had just started prototyping I would have been able to gather feedback much more easily.
The App Sprint
The full blog is here.
Figma seems to be a very good tool for this sort of prototyping, it’s quite easy to use and has some nice features, such as components.
The 3d model/Poster Sprint
The full blog is here.
Rhino is an interesting 3d modelling program, different from all of the other ones that I’ve tried. I haven’t spent enough time with it to decide if it’s better or worse than the others in terms of features, but the learning curve is very steep.
The VR Sprint
The full blog is here.
Mozilla Hubs is not a tool that I would like to develop for again. Spoke in particular, being web based, starts to lag on my laptop with relatively few items, and doesn’t allow for a lot of the features that make an engine good. I’ll likely look into the Mozilla Hubs WebXR Exporter for Unity.