Project #1: redesign a porta potty? Why yes I will.

So our first project in game development was to redesign an object along the lines of IDEO's work.  We drew a fabulous item in the porta potty.  Now you may think that is a horrible object to have to redesign, but I am glad to have it because I personally think there is no way not to improve the porta potty. 

The last two days have been planning days meaning that we formed a group and brainstormed, determining ways in which the current object could be improved.  After this brainstorm we came up with a list of about 20 ideas, we then grouped most of the ideas into 4 categories that we thought the were the most important to fix and assigned 2 people to come up with more ideas for each category.

The 4 categories that we wanted to improve were:
Smell
Safety
Disposal
Transportation

Now I took one for the team and picked the category that I honestly thought was the least exciting, but I feel like I came up with some good ideas anyway.  I guess I will find out if my teammates think I had good plans tomorrow.

While doing some research on transporting porta potties I realized that the real issue was not transporting a single porta potty to a construction site, but rather the massive setup times required at larger events such as state fairs and festivals.  For instance, during the 2009 Lollapalooza music festival they had 654 porta potties on the festival grounds.  To set up that many porta potties it requires a lot of time, and a lot of trucks worth of porta potties.  So I decided that my main focus would be to increase the effectiveness of transporting porta potties in large quantities rather than transporting 1 or 2.

Idea #1:  The first idea I had to help increase transport ability was to reduce the size of the porta potty when not in use.  The area where the toilet sits had to remain in tact, but the extra area around the toilet can be reduced.

Pros:
Reduces space.
Should be easy change the shape.
Con:
Doesn't actually offer that much of a size reduction.

Idea #2: My second idea was in the same vein of reducing the size, but in a direction that should be easier to accomplish and offers more size reduction. 

Pros:
Reduces size by half.
Height locking mechanism also doubles at a way to effectively lock the porta potty when leaving the site.
Cons:
Porta potties are somewhat heavy, so they may be difficult to stack.
I am not sure if it is possible to build something like this.

Idea #3:  For my third idea I decided to switch to a different concept of saving space.  Instead of reducing the size of the porta potties for transport, instead make them fit together better.  I took my inspiration from shopping carts on this one.

Pros:
Saves the most amount of space.
The wider base offers more stability making it more difficult to tip.
Cons:
Inserting one porta potty into another for transport is more difficult than reducing the size.
Is the least efficient way to transport in small quantities.

A new semester, a new class, a new medium.

School is officially back in session.  I know, I don't believe it either, but with two days of classes under my belt I have realized that I can't keep denying it.  For one of the classes I am taking this fall I have to start and maintain a blog chronicling my adventures in Game Development 1.  My initial impression of the class leads me to believe that it will be a very fun and creative experience for me (lets hope it is).

Now I have never blogged before, but I am familiar with the types of blogs you see today.  From what I am familiar with there are three kinds of blogs: the developer blog, the 'let me tell me about my life' blog, and the opinion blog.  This blog is going to be more similar to a developer's blog more than anything else, most posts will detail my weekly progress on projects in the class.  Of course I was as excited as everyone else when I learned that our first assignment was to start a blog (I don't mean that sarcastically).  So of course rather than creating a blog to let it sit blank I immediately had to write a post.  So while this post doesn't contain much of a 'progress report' know that more are coming.