This idea aims to reflect some of that complexity in water ripples, hoping to show how different actions on the project are literally constructive or destructive. This body of water will have a few different features: Point sources, Frequency, and Gates.
The idea is to have a point source for every subgroup of a project team that’s working on a large system. For example, one point source can represent the thruster team for a spaceship, another the flight path planning team. Or for a car, one can represent the software team, and another the proximity sensor team. The sources can be positioned in many ways relative to one another, whether all starting on the same side of a rectangular pool, or different sides of a circular pool, or starting at different distances from the start end of rectangular pool (perhaps to make a literal swim lane diagram).
Each of these point sources can vary the frequency that they dip in to the water, corresponding to major milestones. For a software project, it can be as simple as every time there is a new commit on the project.
This is an example of the complex kind of patterns that can be produced by varying source location and frequency:
Finally, gates are barriers with slits that can be put further down from the point source, such as midway in a rectangular pool. These gates represent the same funding gates or deliverable deadlines that any project has structured into it. These slits serve to change the interference pattern.
More thought will have to be put into exactly what each dip should represent, and what the interference can really mean, and how patterns might be interpreted, but one can imagine that intuitive project feedback it could provide. Teams might also experiment with different locations and frequencies, to see how a project could be structured differently, in terms of timing of deliverables or division of teams.
]]>Sam the Starman owned a very normal sort of treadmill. Every now and then he would use it for a bit of exercise — walking perhaps, or running, or maybe walking, or maybe running.
He also owned some pretty good virtual reality products, that allowed him to pair his treadmill to his video games, immersing him as he ran through the various worlds of warcraft.
But this was not enough for Sam. He dreamt of something more — a richer, deeper experience of the journey through his real and virtual worlds.
And as he dreamt, lo and behold, the ground beneath him changed!
His treadmill was now a brand new Terrmill (Terrain-adaptable-treadmill), a revolutionary new surface that changed according to his in-game terrain, so he could run up mountains or fall into ravines as his avatar did. His exercise routines now turned into riveting obstacle courses, which he could even program into his very own skatepark.
And Sam was never sad again.
I dream of making computer-supported cooperative work platforms that rely on whole body gestures, or ways of reading team performance from biomechanics. I write arts reviews and code biomechanical analyses of ballet for fun.
cjfu@mit.edu
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