Started a new project with a set of new colleges. We had the project introduction on Monday which got us officially started on the project with some brainstorming. Intimacy is our theme, which is a very broad theme but I wouldn’t argue that the other themes are any easier. Since this is a short collaboration(4 days with presentation on day 5), it’s all about iterating and doing quick and fast prototypes. The interpretation of the the theme is up to us as a group to decide what we want to declare as a context.
After some brainstorming and thinking of the subject we landed on “Therapy session”. This context was birthed out of the intimate feeling of sharing your feelings with others. Actually sharing feelings with others in general is an intimate thing for most people so we wanted to give it a limited setting and so we chose therapy session, as in a session with a therapist/psychologist.
So on Monday the core objective was to hone in on some specifics and document it, on Tuesday it was time test out some contexts and try to provoke the situation in order to understand it better. This was an important and crucial step because it would deepen our understanding in the issue. Unfortunately we focused on other things like spending to much time on exploring other context/setting (at the end we decided to go with the therapy session). So we were one day behind on our schedule.
On Wednesday session we got some guiding by Johannes and it helped to rethink in which way we wanted to take our project and how to test out our ideas. Taking the core concept of a therapy session were one person is a professional and actively listens and asks questions, and the other person who tries to unpack their issue/problem. The core in itself can’t be really experimented on, but the surroundings and the setting can.
We started with the communication aspect and tried out what it would be if communication was done differently. We tried texting, video messaging and face to face communication in order to reenact communication on different levels and intimacy was observed.
We also wanted to try out different interior setting where the session is being held and also the physical distance between the therapist and the client. For that we did a paper prototype but it didn’t give us any deeper insights. We might instead try out some role playing where we try to find the optimal distance between the two people and maximal value of intimacy.
What knowledge I take away these three days of group work is following:
- It’s hard to bootstrap a quick project in such a short time without knowing our teammates properly. Everyone is on a different skill level and so I believe we could save in some valuable time in grouping up with people we know or have been in group before with (e.g. video-prototyping groups).
- It’s not expected to be super precise end result rather the key learning is iterations, ideation and quick prototypes. It can be hard for students (for us) to define the level of end result. Most students strive to do as a good job as possible and sometimes we maybe strive to do more than required?
- Coaching and talking to other groups is good practice to develop and ignite different point of views. We often got stuck as group and had to move on due to time. Therefore some aspects/ideas were abandoned rather quickly. On Wednesday when we got to meet everyone again was refreshing and kind of rekindled the focus at developing progression. Hearing how different students dealt with problems and how they solved it inspired and reminded me and the group to think differently and keep an open mind to exploring different solutions.
Micro blogg 