Hey everyone,
Our magazine is almost here! Our research has brought us to many different sources and has broadened our horizon a great deal. Waiting turns out to be a quite complicated process; After almost three weeks of hefty desk research, hands-on field research and market analyses, we’re now working on our hand-designed research magazine. It’s starting to turn out pretty good. While I’m writing this, Sanne and Gionata are hard at work, designing the document and visualizing data. Luckily there is rarely a shortage of pepernoten (By now renamed to ‘Papernuts’) at our side of the Apple island, so morale is high. We received some great articles from friends and acquaintances of MediaLAB and gathered a large database of information by using sources like the UvA library, the HvA library and this new hype called ‘the internet’. Tomorrow we’ll be taking the train to Utrecht to present our results to ProRail. Very exciting.
We just finished a workshop from Charlie Mulholland, doing some brainstorm exercises. The assignment: Come up with one hundred ideas for your concept by next week. Luckily for us, they don’t need to be good ideas. Charlie: “I have an endless amount of really bad ideas every day! But if somewhere between all those bad ideas there is one good idea, that’s still a pretty good score.” Duly noted.
The new foreign students merged with the group flawlessly, and within a day or two they were up to speed on the project and working with everyone else. Our little melting pot is becoming increasingly diverse, with Ankit joining us from India and Gionata, Alberto and Stefano coming from Turin, Italy. We’re now a Japanese-Russian-Italian-Indian-Dutch group, and listening to each other trying to pronounce tongue twisting sentences in foreign languages provides a steady supply of laughs. Meanwhile, Studio HvA is starting to feel like home. We’ve been working here every week day since the start of the project, and in these last days of our research phase we’ve had some late-night dinners here as well. We’ve ordered Surinam, Italian, Indian and Thai so far, and we’re slowly becoming worldly culinary experts. Everyone has claimed their personal workspace by now, and the teams are all seated in a way that allows smooth collaboration. The teams help each other out when needed and provide each other with feedback.
Alright, let’s make a presentation! Also, who’s feeling like Greek?
The ProRail team