Project kick-off preparation

This week we started preparing for a new project: Research for Design. Our sponsor will be NYU Langon Health and I am really excited to kick off the project!

But before we start and find out the problem, we had to get to know our team members, talk about our values, expectations, goals and strengths and personalities.

My group has 5 memebers: Eva, Ruiyang, Shaun, Maria and me.

First, each of us introduced themselves, talking about the background, some strengths and room for improvement, some past works and how each team member find themselves working in a team, which role they usually take and which role they would like to take. It was really interesting to hear from my teammates, how diverse our backgrounds are: architecture, interactive media, PR, linguistics, UX etc.

Then we created a Slack channel to stay in touch and share materials with each other. We decided that we will communicate here:

It is important to use a means of communication that everyone will be comfortable using and of course communication is key for teamwork!

Then we started filling out the Mural board template. We talked about goals for the project.

Seems like most of the team members would like to add this project to their portfolios and gain experience moving through the design process phases. Our team values are collaboration and communication.

Our expectations are for everyone to be active, generate ideas, be transparent, help each other and respond to messages.

Our energy sources are deadlines and breaking big tasks into smaller chunks and having a strategic approach.

Our main obstacle could be schedule conflicts but we decided to meet in person, however, some teammates who don’t live in Brooklyn and cannot meet on campus (including me) will be participating in discussions over Zoom.

I think overall it was a really helpful exercise to make sure we are all on the same page, have similar goals and expectations to eliminate misunderstandings in the future.

Last thing that we did, we took a look at our introductory profiles to see if our goals and interests changed, but it seems like almost for everyone they stayed the same, we asked each other some questions and talked about night owls and early birds. The majority of the team appeared to be night owls or late birds :)

All in all, I think we did a great job getting to know each other and it seems like we still need to think of the name of the team, specific schedule of our meetings and create a Trello board but we will discuss that this coming week.

I am looking forward to starting this new project with my team and I hope to gain some cool experience designing for something that we will find out next week!