11/19/07: Crit Day

I presented my work at our Lab-wide Critique Day last week. Although the presentation didn't go as well as I had hoped (at this stage I should have a more clear idea of the system than I actually do), I got really good feedback. Here are some comments:

I would have hoped to see a better idea of the parental and child interfaces at this point...the UI ideas need to be firmed up quickly. I fear that it will be difficult to examine the psychological impact in the course of a masters project.

Paulina's project is potentially of great benefit and interest. Parents and children have a hard time separating, and travel can be a particularly stressful time for all. While others work on research to reduce the need for travel, it is certainly appropriate for us to be exploring ways to lessen the impact on loved ones.

Using a object intermediary does make this the sort of work that tends to polarize people's opinion of the lab. The "cuteness" of the project is likely to both enthrall the press and attract criticism of triviality. This raises the bar of the work needing to be both innovative engineering and well grounded / well evaluated in terms of the psychological impact.

I think Paulina should narrow to a particular child age range (toddler 2-4?) and get the psychology expertise for this group and start running prototypes by them.

This is a really interesting problem, but I feel that Paulina has not quite articulated accurately enough what the unique novel idea is that she will be exploring in her solution. One suggestion I have is that she goes & talks to some child psychologists, in addition to interviewing a lot of parents & kids...Especially literature on role playing, on connecting/communicating through an object, etc. Maybe by reading some of this literature she would be able to better articulate what the key idea is and why the whole physical object proposal is important/key.

I completely agree with these comments. My concept is too weak and it has to be nailed down as soon as possible.