Our Project
Project Sparks is a semster-long ETC project derived from Tomorrow Life, an initiative aiming at promoting engaging dialogues among scientists and members of general public to collectively build a positive future. Our goal is to design an highly interative experience to better harness the power of storytelling to increase public engagement to an extent that previous efforts failed to achieve. The final form of deliverable is still to be explored.
Our Client
Our client is Dr. Samira Kiani, associate professor at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who carries a eager will to engage the public with science knowledge as will a strong interet in scientific filmmaking. Dr. Samira seeks to explore a more innovative, interactive and entertaining way to attract the attention of the lager public.
The First Meeting
We had our first with the project instructor, Brenda Bakker Harger, over zoom in the middle of the week. Brenda hosted the meeting and we all introduced our background and reason for signing up for the project to the team. In the end, we were all very excited to have a well-balanced team of 5 with clearly defined roles:
Jerry – programmer / external producer
Valerie – UI/UX designer / internal producer
Yukti Gupte – 2D artist
Ash – 2D/3D artist
Peter – game designer / technical artist
What Else We’ve Done
Prepare For Work
For the first 2 weeks of remote colloboration, we decided to use Discord for discussion and daily updates.
Jerry will be in charge of email communication with Brenda, Dr. Samira and other ETC faculties, while Valerie will focus more on project management. We set up a team calendar and decided team core hours together.
Research & Question List
Since Dr. Samira won’t be available for a meeting until next Wednesday, we decided to start our research based on the current project description to see if we can find some inspirations. We devided our research into: social media, exibitions & organizations, movies, Twitch and Youtube.
Apart from that, we also tried digging into the previous efforts that the team of Tomorrow Life had made to figure out what exactly is the challenge we are facing and understand what we could do to better satisfy the client. Along with the research, we came up with a list of question for Dr.Samira as a preparation for next week’s meeting.
Plan For the Next Week
For week 2, we will be meeting with the client on Wednesday. So we will share our research on Monday and create a PowerPoint to better present our research to the client. Ideally, we are going to get a clear point of what Dr. Samira wants out of this project and start brainstorming after the meeting.
Also, there are tons of materials due on week 2(jamboard, logo, poster, halfsheet, dev blog, etc). We will have these work distributed to team members and get ready for the 1/4 walkaround on week 3.