I am happy with the system I have designed and feel it would encourage strangers to talk to each other. Testing indicates that my animation communicates my idea clearly, a key piece of criteria for the assignment. Several people who I showed the animation to asked if this was a real system I was helping implement, showing not only plausibility for my idea, but interest. However, whilst communicating my idea effectively was important the idea itself was equally so.
Whilst my idea would work to encourage communication between strangers, it would not be without difficulties. The system would only work if a large number of people were registered, and there were a lot of nodes. Unlike other ideas I had, this system, if it were implemented would reach more people than my other ideas put together, but the problem still remains that it requires registration. It would be easy for the nodes to be configured in a way to harass people with bluetooth active to register, but I am unsure of the legality of bluetooth spam. Legal or not it would almost certainly not be welcome.
It is my own fault that my final demonstration animation is without sound, I read this particular clause a little too late, almost too late to remove the audio track. I was tempted to record my own voice reading out the text as it came on screen, which was my main influence when working out the timings for slide transitions, but I didn't think it would feel right. I am unsure why we were not allowed to use found audio for this assignment, as even freelance designers in the real world often outsource certain things for projects. Considering as of yet we haven't been taught any sound editing I think this rule gives those who are more musically able than others an unfair advantage. Regardless I cannot change the printed instructions, which is why version2 was the penultimate version.
I think I got too bogged down in research for this project, thankfully I was able to keep all my references as I went along. There is a lot of information out there, and once I started finding things out it was difficult to stop researching and start writing up. It got to the stage where I had nothing written up neatly, but pages of notes for research. For my next project I would like to try and avoid this and write as I research, but it will be difficult, especially if I am interested by the topic. Despite this project having a high word count, it could have been higher, several sections were cut entirely because I decided they were completely irrelevant. I have trimmed the project down to only what I feel are valid points, relating specifically to my task of designing for my issue.
Another thing I would like to rectify for the next assignment is my use of printed literature. Other than 'Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments' by Stanley Milgram I did not seek out any physical books for my research. I didn't feel the need to, perhaps this was due to technological nature of my project I felt the Internet was better equipped to answer my questions.
I feel my documentation was very good, the best yet from me. While it was considerably more time consuming than previous assignments I feel the effort shows. It would have been nice if i hadn't had to code every single page by hand, but unfortunately for me php can't be run from a CD (as far as I know).
To conclude, my idea was communicated successfully through my diagrams and animation. Initially I discovered my first final artifact idea was not as original as I had hoped, but I soon found weaknesses in it and settled into a final system which would work much better anyway. My research was good but perhaps a little too in depth, and lacked in published works, I feel this can be justified somewhat due to the fast paced area I was working in. My initial ideas were somewhat carried through to my final artifact, there are certainly similarities between my final nodes concept and my 'Two person kiosk' and 'Discussion starter'.
