Week 3

There are a lot of variations on what constitutes an "effective" team or a successful team. Shelves upon shelves of self-help and project management "guides" are used and people follow them like the bible. Ultimately, I don't believe that there is any one method that will create the perfect team although I believe that there are certain parts of any number of methods that could create an extremely effective team. In the prescribed online reading, there were multiple quizzes regarding "what kind of teamwork" that we've done; "Are you an effective team member?", things like that. These only help if you're really honest with yourself. "I start the group working", well what if someone gets in there first? (For the record, I was "in there" first, jussayin'). Some of the questions were a simple matter of whether or not you were an open-minded person, something that could be solved in a matter of a few questions.

Going back to teamwork, I just finished reading a book on a certain project management practice. Having its roots from Agile methodology, Scrum, an iterative methodology, is a practice used mostly in software development and consists of a series of iterations called "sprints" (which last one to four weeks). The name itself comes from rugby and the idea that the team moves forward as one unit, aiming for a shared, common goal. In the "Working In Teams" reading, there was a lot of talk about roles and designated positions. In Scrum, however, there are no real "roles" or responsibilities. If an issue comes up, the team relies on the overall communication abilities of the team and the bond within the team to resolve the issue. Think: self-cleaning dishwasher. Iterative, does the given work and cleans up after itself. A perfect student. Speaking of which, Scrum has been applied to schools in Europe, resulting in stellar grades according to one science teacher in Germany.

My point is this: for a team to work effectively, there needs to be an effective communication flow, mutual respect and a certain level of competency (something that I haven't mentioned yet). If there's an issue, talk about it. Don't let it sit and simmer. Getting out of your comfort zone and moving is sure as sh** better than staying still. The best part: my team works great. There's a great level of communication (something that took a little while but we got there), respect, and we're still working on the competency part but with the former two, I think we have a pretty solid foundation to work with.

Every Design Course

This is my inbox right now. Every design course I do, this happens. Seriously.







I should learn how to block these notifications.Or not idk

Week 2

Which famous NFL player is born in the months between April and September, likes cats more than dogs, doesn't like either Taylor Swift or Kanye West and fits in the designer side of a programmer-designer spectrum? 

You guessed it, Tom Brady. 

These hour-long "get to know each other" sessions are great. Some people know each other and that's fine and they stick together even if one loves dogs and the other is deathly allergic to dogs and anything good in life. Nature finds a way. What I'm saying is that these sessions are a gentle way of guiding people to find their group members albeit slowly. It's a little like speed-dating. The bell goes ding and you switch groups and pick a new topic so that you can start talking whack about the thing on the other side of the spectrum. I've never gone speed-dating.

The second hour of the contact consisted of actually coming up with ideas as to what an online archive (called Trove) could be used for. 

A cold start but we progressed. We began by considering a few things:

• What it was
• Online archive source
• Who could access it (main audience)
• Schools
• Anyone interested in historical facts of a certain topic
• What could be accessed
• Music
• News Articles
• Books
• Pictures
• Statistics
• Other sources
• What could be made from the information on the site
• a blog
• games
• puzzles
• comprehension (Q&A)
• informative website about the childhood memories of Vanor(?) McDonald
• I didn't write this stuff but my writing isn't exactly any more legible
• An example from last year was an interactive timeline based on Australian Inventions using the Trove API to source the pictures and information

The image below is what we whipped up.

Workshop is tomorrow so I'll have that to look forward to. Cool beans.

Intro to DECO1800

Just having finished two heavily group-work based design courses (DECO1100 and DECO1400),
I'm having mixed feelings about group work and I can't say I'm looking forward to it. What I can say is that I'm looking forward to a challenge. I'm hoping that I'll improve my skills in group work and collaboration. Team members have dropped out in the week that assessment was due, they've failed to arrive on crucial meetings but hey. Third time lucky right.

I've heard only good things about the course and anything bad came from the team members. If there's anything to watch out for, it would be team efficiency and communication.

Here's to a good rest of the year and, god, I hope a good semester too.