On Thursday morning we presented our visualisations, and I was rather impressed with a couple of them, it was as if someone had upped the ante since our last presentation and people had risen to the challenge. Our team did not however present which annoyed me after all the work I put in, but the problem was that at the moment I'm a bit short on certain tools, in this case a USB stick (a couple of weeks ago I had 2 of them!) so I copied the swf (the file Flash creates) to my mobile phone. Contrary to the idea that macs "just work", the macs at BCT did not recognise my phone and I guess it would be wildly uncool to pop up and say "I need a driver" like Windows might, so macs just do.... nothing. Oh by the way, I usually abuse Windows far more than I abuse OSX, but OSX is not perfect. And with Windows 7, there are actually some UI elements that make OSX look a bit... clunky to use. Strange but true. Anyway, it didn't occur to me to burn it to CD, I have a stack of them around here.

Thursday's lesson we were to get into groups of 4 and follow instructions on a set of cards that had been shuffled in random order. Each member of the group had a role, one was to carry out the task (The Actuator). One was to read the task and direct the Actuator (The Controller). One was to chart the progress of the Actuator on a map (The Tracker). And one was to sit outside of the group and observe and record it using whatever methods available (The Sensor). Our group had 3 people so The Controller and the Actuator became the same person. I was the Sensor. The instructions included "walk to nearest traffic lights", "Follow a man with a tattoo for 2 minutes", "Take something free" as well as instructions like "Turn 90 degrees left". So all groups wound up taking different paths through the city and had it recorded in video, pictures and drawings.

The next part was to find a way to present our excursion leveraging the abilities of individual members of the group. I floated the idea that we make a video using all our material and perhaps animation for the map and narrate it. This was met with scepticism by the group as it would not be interactive, so we moved onto Flash. Trouble is none of are expert enough with Flash to guarantee that we wouldn't be there until midnight and quite frankly this did not appeal as I'd already done as much the previous 2 nights and I was starting to get tired. So we moved on to PowerPoint which I cannot personally use (and being a bit of a snob to MS Office for various reasons I won't bore you with, never really had the desire to learn), so I relinquished control of the lab iMac and got lunch. While eating lunch, two things occurred to me:

1, We had ditched Adobe Premiere video-making because it wasn't interactive in favour of PowerPoint... which is also not interactive - and pretty rubbish by comparison.

2, If were were going to do a Slideshow with video elements, why not do it in InDesign and export as pdf, which will mimic a PowerPoint slideshow quite well - one could even have naff transitions if you are that way inclined. Over all it could look 10 times better and well designed and of course, one of our members was experienced with the application so we could do the job faster. Er, that person is me. I got back and mentioned this. Soon the group was quite dissatisfied with the current progress, so we decided to boot it for the InDesign method.

The result was finished at about 6:30, although I took it home and tweaked a few small things about it. We presented it on Friday morning, and a few of the other presentations were very impressive. Including one in PowerPoint that looked like a proper slide presentation (rather than like all the terrible ones that you get in emails that that one guy in the office forwards you all the time, made by other bored office workers. You know the ones, mundane subject turned into a ppt file. Comic-sans font, awful and slow transitions and a degree of pointlessness because it would have been more effective as just a normal email with pictures and text attached). Unfortunately despite all videos being encoded in some standard codec inside .mov (quicktime) format, it working on this windows machine (that doesn't even have quicktime installed), and working on the lab macs, the mac used for the presentation threw up errors when I tried to play a video. Ugh! The show went on without the video component, and our team realised that perhaps although we had little time, we should have budgeted in some practice so we knew who was saying what rather than look at each other as if to say "No you speak". But it was an okay first presentation, not by any means a shambles. But roll on the leased laptops, something that will take some of the unpredictability out of our future presentations.

The rest of the day was fairly relaxed, a BBQ with all years and the first of the laptops arrived for student's who had paid the bond. I haven't yet but will be um... soon.

So that was the first week, fun although tiring. This weekend hasn't been one of total relaxation though, I've mulled over the week's lessons so I could blog about them, done some self-directed learning on Edward Tufte and prepared for tomorrow by nosing around the online resources for tomorrow's class that have already been put up. Plus preparation for moving soon to a more appropriate living situation (ie one that doesn't cost the kind of money that I no longer earn) and trading past life items for cash on trademe in the process. Exciting!

Next week's known challenges: more design work on this blog and trying to be more succinct in posts.

Oh and working out why comments are not currently working. It will be fixed... - Edit: It IS fixed!!