This week I would like to reflect briefly on the Makey Makey presentations during last Thursday’s class. Everyone’s project was unique, interesting, and creative. I’m not suggesting that I want to continue to play with Makey Makey, but the two takeaways for me are, I believe, important.

The first takeaway is that the device, along with its various uses, represents a challenge to us all. That challenge is not in whether we can use these in completely unpredictable ways or that we can imaginatively construct controllers out of commonly available produce, but whether we can approach problems in new ways or challenge one another to rethink our solutions to existing problems.

The second takeaway, not specifically from the Makey Makey, is the power in thinking about design guidelines, their construction, and their presentation to others. This exercise, being a collaborative one, caused us each to contribute, and to challenge one another in constructive ways, and to logically think about what we were attempting to do with the Makey Makey framing our thinking to answer such questions as why we were doing with this thing in the first place. This aspect of the project was the most important, in my opinion. Working as a team, rather than individually, made our project much stronger than it otherwise could have been by any one of us working on it alone. In our project’s design document all three of us worked together on the document, and while we did a nice job of masking the individual voices they are indeed present. The document and the project, reflect input, ideas, and thought expressed by each member of the team and then made better by dialoging throughout the process.

Indeed, I think it is this design document that became the strongest part of the project and should serve as a valuable lesson for the future where such a document need not be constrained to software or system design alone.