A Successful Failure

First review took place yesterday.
Interesting experience to say the least.

Rewind to Monday evening...
The group got going pretty well and had a really strong brainstorming session. We actually got excited about this project for the first time. We really worked well together and formulated a concept that related to time usage of different spaces and designing areas that overcome the time restrictions we found evident within the city. We come up with a frank plan that we like, with tons more ideas in our heads that we havent quite gotten onto paper. We go for our sketched idea because none of the other groups had really designed any similar ideas in the past and we wanted ours to be original (big mistake numero uno). We work with the Predator idea of night vision and focus on the hot spots of the city changing between day and night. We use our time research to come up with areas most densely used at different times.

Things that led me to believe our review was bound for failure...
I am sometimes an optimist...but laaate monday night...just not enough things had gone wrong. It was creepy...and nice? We finished around 5 and actually got about an hour of sleep which is completely unheard of for me before a review. We all meet back up at 8am and go to the university at 8 to print. The printing...went well...which is always suspicious for me haha because i dont think thats ever happened for me before. We get back to studio and easily find some white paper to mount the small maps on and some push pins.

Fast Forward to Crit
Our presentation went ok...we tried to explain our ideas. I dont think we succeeded...at all. Juan Carlos did not like, well, anything that we had done. He felt that we had done nothing at all since the last week. The datascape was still a total miss in his opinion. As well as the Frank plan. And the rest was old information in his opinion. Well, we did actually have reasoning behind our ideas. The hot spots on the datascape did actually directly relate to our site design ideas, although that did not seem to have been presented well enough. We wanted our whole focus, in fact, to be around these hot spots and to be able to create spaces that transformed in ways throughout the day to fulfill different purposes. For example, a park space within the site that had LED screens that were maps and information during the day, an maybe music video screens for an outdoor club in the park at night. We wanted this park to not have an "open" and a "closed" but more of a continual usage. Professor Hecker had some really interesting ideas about making the datascape a video, which we had really wanted to do all along, and to show the change of space use throughout the day, week, month, year (sounds like a TON of info!!!) but all in all, I think we want to try some element of that idea.

Final Feelings
Yesterday's review was pretty disappointing. I feel like we finally got really going in a direction we liked, and we tried to do a few of the things that were required in a little different, creative way. I dont think that was well received in most ways. We did get some feedback that we are going to work with but our general direction of thought seems pretty confused right now. Good thing we're going to the Netherlands today and we have plenty of time to clear our heads!