Blog week 2
Online reflective journal 

Visualisation of my ideas

I had three ideas in total, which are all relevant to maps. 

The first one is giving the map of Australia a timeline with population and living expenses showing on the map. And as the timeline move from one point to another, the data/statistic of the population and living expenses in different places will change dynamically. At the same time, obvious sign of the variation of the data will be displayed too. 

The second one is about combining photographs and map locations. We pull a random photograph from the SLQ and display it to users to let users guess where it is and let them pinpoint on the map. We offer several chances of guessing and tell users when the photo was taken after the user answered correctly. 

Reflection on brainstorming method

What I did during the first brainstorming was nothing helpful, I checked previous students' work and get a general idea of what mine should be like, but then I found that all my later-generated ideas are just so similar to those ones that I have seen. So none of them are novel or inspiring. 

But the second time i did the brainstorming was by drawing an idea map in my mind, about what aspects can i possibly get ideas from (combined with the databases in SLQ which tell me what i'm offered to use), and then I chose a favourite aspect, in this case map. And i start the brainstorming of coming up with new aspects in the level of map (as basis). And it did help me a lot. 

The advantage of the first method is that I won't generate some 'nonsense' ideas which is not even close to the expected one, but its disadvantage is that it strict my thoughts and I can't get out of the cage, meaning that it makes it really hard to generate novel ideas. 

For the second method, which is useful, its benefit is that it's divided into different levels, giving me the ability to get board ideas at first stage and focus on one specific one afterwards. It makes it possible to generate ideas that are brand new and inspiring. But its drawback is that it takes heaps of time which can be devastating if the ideas are in urgent (but accelerating the process will result in the loss of quality). 

Key opportunities & challenges

Key opportunities for the next couple of weeks can be us forming the new group and make a great design choice and put our hands on it. 

But the challenges are that it might be really difficult to make a design choice and we may make variation later on (making it difficult to construct) and we haven't set any time frame on our work yet. So this is what we will be working on this week. 

For the skills, personally I really need to do a bit of work on API and PHP all that kind of technical stuff. And I'll make great use of workshop and my own time studying them.