MediaLAB Adventure

Hi all, this blog will keep you posted with our adventures! Meet our team: José, Marvin, and Sanjay. We are three MediaLAB students. We will be doing a project for the Port of Amsterdam the coming 5 months. Our assignment is to integrate smart eyewear technology into the quality assessment system of the Port of Amsterdam in the area of maintenance of public spaces. But more about that later on!

We started at the MediaLAB on February 4th. On the first day we had to present ourselves using a pecha kucha presentation. The following days we attended some interesting workshops and meetings. One of those workshops was about the methodology we are ought to use during the project. Scrum, as this methodology is named, is supposed to make the project a little bit easier. This method should help us make a lot of prototypes! The project is divided over multiple sprints. In the first sprint, sprint 0, we had to create an user scene.

Animating the user scene

An user scene is basically a visualization of the problem the assigner wants us to solve. We chose to make an animation for this particular case. After revising the storyboard a couple of times it was time to animate! We spent all Tuesday designing, animating and editing the user scene. You can see our result over here. Wednesday we had a meeting with all MediaLAB students where each team showed their user scene to the other students.

The view from “het havengebouw”

The next day we finally got to meet our assigner. We met at “het havengebouw”. Joost and Steve arranged a two-hour tour through the port. During the tour they told us some interesting facts and figures about the port. The tour took us to some interesting places like Ruigoord and the coal depot. We also went to “de boerderij”, the place we will be working from once every two weeks. We will be working at the Port of Amsterdam one day a week, alternating between “de boerderij” and “het havengebouw”. After the tour we returned to “het havengebouw” —which, as it turned out, has an amazing view over the port and part of Amsterdam. There we had a meeting with the Port of Amsterdam where we showed our user scene. Needless to say, both parties are really excited about the project —which will in all likelihood include a lot of experimenting with smart eyewear!