At the interfaculty we were given the opportunity to choose between a couple of courses, varying from rather technical to more creative. Not being a pure graphic designer, I chose Industrial Media Applications (IMA) and The Extended Enterprise (TEE) as my 2 courses of choice.
The Extended Enterprise
TEE was mainly an e-marketing/consultancy course. The course covered several aspects of e-marketing including customer relationship management, ambient intelligence and the theory of the “Longest Tail”. Main goal of the course was to engage in a project with a local company, and investigate how they could extends their physical enterprise with an e-commerce platform. We went to the music shop in Heerlen, and talked to the manager to find out which ambintions he has, and in what direction he wants to go with his store. The final result was a case study, covering several aspects like logistics requirements, customer relationship management and software recommendations.
Industrial Media Applications
IMA on the other hand was the most technical course available. Given by renowned German lecture Prof. Dr. Ing. Thomas Ritz, things got quite technical, and nerdy, to say the least. Covering subjects like data encryption, SaaS and web requests, this was a course for the die hard techies (hence only 5 Belgian students). For our main assigment, we started out from a given problem: when a representative is on the road, making his pitch by various prospects, he missed the possibility to customize and personalize his digital presentations on the spot. So, starting out from this problem, we figured the representative needs a mobile application to create and modify presentations. We developed a Rich Internet Application, allowing a representative to load pre-designed slides and apply them to a presentation. Data management and service requests were handled by a CakePHP driven back-end.