Having a baby on the way

No, as opposed to what most of the people in my life like to assume, I’m not pregnant. However, I feel like I’m having a baby on the way. We started working on our projects at the lab very intensely lately and in a way it feels like a pregnancy. The 'baby' is not really there, I don’t even have a real name for it, but I think about it all the time, I want to find ways to make his life easy as possible and make sure you will be perfectly ready when he comes out to the world. That’s my baby, or if to be precise that is our baby, our team.

Like in real life, every one of us have a different vision in his mind about this project, each one sees a different picture in his mind when we close our eyes and think about this baby we have on the way. The best case will be if we all have the same vision, but that will also said that no one was unique in the process, no one was necessary to the creation because we all had the same idea. The beautiful thing in this baby is that we all brought ourselves into this process.

The first few sessions were easy! We all had the same enthusiasm from the same things (well… almost) but when we got to the heart of the issue we could clearly see how different we all are. The easiest decisions are those that take hours to take. Every sentence in the page is a real creation of 4 different minds that changed it at least 4 or 5 times before it was written and saved in the document. We are spending hours together, on the phone, in the wave (Google that is) and on the couches in the CS-Communication lobby… and that is all before we really started working on the real thing.

I really hope we can all save our butterflies till the end of the way…

The Process of Creation

Woooow!!!!

I think that word (or whatever you’d like to call it) will best describe what I feel after the workshop we had at the lab with the HIT and Microsoft guys. I must admit that at first it was not really my idea of a good weekend – spend my Thursday evening and Friday morning at school, but with no doubts it was quite amazing.

OK… a few words that may help you understand what the hell I’m talking about.

Thursday evening at 17:30 we had a session at the media innovation lab involving 2 other groups. The first group is the HIT (Holon Institute of Technology) students from the industrial designed faculty. The second group is the Microsoft innovation lab team. The first day was all about brain storming, we got an idea to start with - a dreidel, that, was only the beginning… if you could only see or at least listen to the great ideas people had there you wouldn’t believe it all began from a dreidel.

To be honest, I was quite skeptic about this story from the beginning. Who could believe that we can create all of that and in such a short time?! Apparently, a beat of faith is all you need.

I had a great team – Efrat and Meital from the lab, Noga from the Microsot lab and Na’ama and Ofer from HIT lab. When we were asked to say what is a dreidel for us we all agreed that balance is the key word. We build a game that looks a little bit like an octopus that hold 5 long black pipes as legs and one clear pipe in the middle. The purpose of the game was to stand on the black pipes so the water in the tank will rise up until the line marked on the clear pipe. We marked 2 lines – lower and upper bounds and the purpose was to locate the water line exactly in the middle of both. If it was under the lower bound the game will cry “please, lift me up, oh.. please!” but if the water was over the upper bound it will start crying “oh no.. it’s too high, please let me get down…”.

The implementation was quite easy. We used two electrical circles and a very simple programming language designed especially for kids. The hard part was to keep the water in the tank and seal all the pipes and connections. All of the other groups had great project as well.

I came back home late but very pleased.