7/28 Design Critique Meeting Recap

Well, our first attempt to stream our meetings was a resounding success-slash-FAIL.  We had about 16 actual-real-life people in the room and a consistent remote viewership of about a dozen people (and about 20 all told over the course of the evening), with lots of chat feedback from the remote audience.  All of that was great.  But when I went to save the recording: FAIL.  Too embarrassing to go into detail (let’s just say I thought that CANCEL button meant, er, something else).  Better luck next time, I suppose, though I’m disappointed.

We’ll be trying a few things differently next go round. Aside from not breaking things, we’ll look into better views of the presentations themselves, rather than a shot of a darkened room with blobs moving around.  Options include picture-in-picture or two simultaneous streams, or dumping the “room view” altogether when the presentation is heavily projection-driven.

In any case:  the meeting itself was very informative and dynamic, with lots of participation from the in-person audience.

10/28 Meeting Recap: Design Critique and Discussion

Well, we had a lively group on the 28th – 16 people, 6 of them new faces and a few we hadn’t seen in awhile.  We also had Rodney Santwier from FileMaker, who talked about licensing for a bit with the group members.

For some background on this night’s meeting, we put out a call a few weeks beforehand for “victims” to submit themselves and their solutions to a high-level design conversation.  I’ve been starting to move meetings from a “present the product or obscure topic” mode to a more interactive, real-world locus for dialogue, and this critique session is one part of that.  We’ve also been doing “Design Challenges”, which is a subject for another post.

Bryant Minard, Wes Maughan and Jeff Moore all stood up and presented their solutions for critique – so thanks, you guys.  Interesting stuff, very varied, and good job focusing the conversation on the features and design decisions you wanted feedback on.  I honestly had no idea whether things would take off, but people seemed up to the game and jumped right in.

We also had Jim Huynh present his Sudoku generation solution.  It sounds at first blush like a toy – and it is – but having looked under the hood of this thing, I have to say it’s the first time in a long while where I looked at a FileMaker solution and, while understanding how all the parts worked, had no idea how the math worked.  Very interesting stuff.

The presentations wrapped up around 8:15, which is late for us, and we were kicking folks out the door at 9.  Not bad.

Colin