oops

so maybe booking a trip to london my last weekend here was a bad idea. at least after the volcanic ash cloud decided to wreak a little havoc once again and keep us grounded an extra night. which wouldn't have been a big deal if it didn't keep me from my last crit/sort of pretty important final presentation for a project i've been working on all semester with alcatel lucent/bell labs. our job has been to research and develop from start to finish a communication tool (think skype, facebook, gmail) for a specific user. (i ended up designing something called "mailbox" for elementary school aged kids.) i'll admit that i was skeptical about the class at first, but i really have learned a lot of valuable things along the way. everything from product analysis and positioning, user research and ethnography, wireframing and mapping, how to use the student's t-test, and really getting to the nitty gritty of interactivity. it would have been nice to wrap the project all up with a bow today, but i guess i'll write this post about it instead. thank you mother nature. we are officially fighting.