This blogpost reflects on the first stage of RI2, it follows the GIBBS reflective method (cited in The University of Edinburgh 2023) which you can learn more about here. To read more about week 8 content and activities click here and to read a reflection on the week as a whole click here.
The beginning of the project has been smooth even though there was the obstacle of me not being very available as I had a pretty loaded schedule with previously committed to engagements.
Our first meeting Thursday evening consisted of having fun with the sticky note function on Miro and brainstorming. Once we relaxed into the digital and remote aspect of the meeting we quickly started bouncing ideas off each other, naturally took turns documenting what the other was saying and moved easily through quite a lot of ideas.
I definitely noticed that having Hannah there meant that we went in different directions than if I had been working on this project by myself. See Figures 1 to 3 below to see what we came up with. We were both especially excited about the idea of helping people understand where they have blocked during a creative project and how to get them out of these ruts - the expression “find the friction” had a lot of resonance with us.
Fig. 1: Hannah Cattanach and Sarah Gomes Munro 2023. Brainstorming 1.
Fig. 2: Hannah Cattnach and Sarah Gomes Munro 2023. Brainstorming 2.
Fig. 3: Hannah Cattanach and Sarah Gomes Munro: 2023. Brainstorming 3.
I was going to be unavailable over the first weekend as I had signed up for a gamejam and we therefore decided to ideate separately and come back together monday evening. On that monday evening call I turned up a bit underprepared as the exhaustion of the last few weeks finally made themselves felt and I was unable to do any work throughout the day. Hannah had also had a bit of brain sludge over the weekend but came with the idea of the learning stories (a website in which you can view how people have gone about acquiring a skill so that you can assess how you might go about doing it yourself, see figure 4 below) so we decided to come back the following day having worked on the ideas a little bit more.
Fig. 4: Hannah Cattanach: 2023. Learning Stories Wireframe.