The Maps and Journeys project was a difficult one for me; to create a piece of art in any form that involved audience participation caused mass panic in my brain at the beginning, this is because my ideas always ended up being one or the other instead of being a nice mix of both. Initially I started out with an idea of creating a piece that forced the audience to use all five senses of the body; taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch. Unfortunately this caused issues in my ideas as there were giant risks with creating interactive art with taste, mainly due to hygiene issues and not knowing what could transfer between people.
After hearing both Leanna's and Kat's ideas I thought it was a good idea that we joined forces and created a project between the three of us, we began talking about combining all three ideas and creating a video using a kinect in which the participant needs to physically walk and then choose decisions of which way they go. This combined both Leanna's landscape idea and Kat's butterfly effect idea, and then we were going to mix in my five sense idea at times. After our first Skype meeting we decided to go with another idea as this was too advanced for us to make, especially with using the kinect when we hadn't learnt coding yet. This is where we came up with the idea of doing a Farnham wide scavenger hunt, which we later found out was really an Urban Quest, to get people interacting with their surroundings. Fortunately this idea was similar to Nick's original idea so we invited him to the group which proved very useful, it also meant we could get more done than we would have.
With our initial Student Challenge idea we decided to get a website up and running, and post on the Freshers page on Facebook to see if anyone would be interested in taking part. Unfortunately we either didn't explain it well, or nobody was interested, meaning that no-one signed up to the challenge resulting in us changing our idea again to having several quests that anyone could do whenever they wanted which was a lot better.
However due to us taking so long to come up with an initial idea, it meant that we were quite far behind and timing had become an issue. Preferably we should have gotten advertisement out earlier on, and formed a group earlier instead of joining part way through the year. This resulted in our advertisement being sent out and placed into the University for students to see at a time when everyone has deadlines, thus meaning people really weren't doing any tasks due to being busy. However we did receive emails and messages asking if the event was lasting longer as they'd really like to do it once the deadlines are over, which was very uplifting for the team as we were worried no-one was interested at all. If we were to do it again I'd definitely make sure any form of advertisement is out the moment the idea is formed, or at least nearer to that time. Also I would make the event take place at either the beginning of a University year, for the Freshers, or in January when most Universities deadlines are over and there is a week of re-freshers.
Another big thing with timing was our time management as a team, with other big projects going on at the same time as Maps and Journeys we all felt overwhelmed and ended up focusing on one project at a time. This meant we were all very focused on Studio Shoot just after we came up with the Farnham Urban Quest idea; resulting in us not motivated to make and produce the forms of advertisement for the event, which led to us getting it all out within the University too late. Definitely next time I'll make sure myself and everyone in the group has deadlines to do the individual work by and sticks to them, hopefully this means people will be more organised and anything important will be done at the time it needs to be.
Thankfully communication wasn't a big problem within this group; we had frequent Skype calls and everyone attended any meetings we had planned at Uni, also we all had each others numbers to get in contact for emergencies or to remind of the meetings. We also set up a Facebook group page between the four of us where we kept each other updated with what we were doing, and if anyone came up with any tasks we needed to do and may have forgotten we posted them up on there as well. However we did have one issue with communication and that was during out Studio Shoot week. As I mentioned before we had a time management problem and ended up having a slight lack of motivation due to the overwhelming amount of work we thought we all had, which resulted in Leanna posting about posters and not getting any responses from us until about two days later. This would also be corrected by making sure everyone manages their time correctly, and possibly a couple more meetings to discuss the work in person so we could help each other out then and there.
Overall, if this event was taking place at a different time of the year I reckon it could have worked out well. I feel asking people to do small tasks that are part of someone else's project results in lack of interest from people, as they are more focused on their work and deadlines that they don't want to take part in anything else. Also if we were to create the event again I would make sure we talk to the SU and try and get them involved; this is because they could provide us with better advertising and prizes, plus they are the main source of student events at the University so they could integrate the event itself with Freshers events.