Hello fellow reader! It is now Week 7, and although I couldn't be in class today to discuss with my teammates, we did communicate to eachother via the magic of modern technology (social media). We all shared ideas, and I got to admit my group is pretty creative. Although this was supposed to be the week we locked in our concept, in all honesty we didn't.
Looking at it now, the bigger issue wasn't the medium though. It was that we were all still fairly new to each other (or at least I was), and nobody wanted to be the person who shot down someone else's idea. The awkward truth is that all the ideas on the table were genuinely good, different communities, different angles, all of them workable within the brief. That actually made it harder to decide, not easier. When everything is a reasonable option, the conversation defaults to "yeah that could work" rather than "let's go with that one."
What we did manage to agree on was a direction: food. Every idea that resonated had something to do with making, sharing, or finding food. That felt like enough common ground to move forward with, even without a fully defined concept. We knew we were narrowing toward a niche food community of some kind, most likely tied to a specific cultural context in Sydney, but the exact framing was still open.
Even at this vague stage, thinking about food as the subject matter started surfacing some useful design questions. Food content has a natural structure to it. Recipes have ingredients, steps, quantities, etc. Which means there's a real decision to be made about how much of that structure to enforce in the data model versus letting posts be freeform.
A freeform post is easier to build and easier for users to write. But if ingredients are just text buried inside a post body, you lose the ability to do anything meaningful with them. For instance, searching by ingredient, linking to where you can buy something, filtering by what you have at home. Structure unlocks features. The question is: how much structure is worth the added friction?
This tension between expressive posts and structured data is something we'll need to resolve once the concept is finalised. For now it's just something to keep in mind. Whatever food niche we land on, the answer to "how structured should a recipe be?" will significantly shape both the database schema and the submission form design.
So where did we leave it? Well, I'm not sure how it will go next week. I personally think it's hard to pick because there are so many concept possibilities, so many things that we could potentially do! However, we all agreed we would definetly finalize a concept ASAP. Because we had already had a direction but not a decision. Food community, Sydney-based, culturally specific in some way. The concept would get finalised the following week when we could actually sit down together and work it out properly.
That's a wrap for this post, see you all in the next one!