Week 2 @ MxM — The Pursuit of Happiness
So just like that, two weeks in Diespeker Wharf have flown in. They say that time flies by when you’re having fun, and it’s safe to say that the saying applies here for my time here already. I feel that I’m beginning to find my feet in the workplace and have gotten to grips with the general office routine.
However, thats not to say that days here are predictable at Made by Many. For instance, the tumultuous weather in London gives that of my native Scotland a run for it’s money — you can walk into work in the morning wearing as little as shorts and a t-shirt, and walk out in the evening needing a wetsuit for a frolic through a torrent of rain. Mother Nature’s indecisiveness was summed up perfectly on Thursday afternoon. Just as we sat down to give our first interview of the project with Kevin about our brief (more on that in a minute), the heavens opened, with rain and thunder crashing all around Islington, and a half hour later we were told that the power had been cut. This unfortunately meant we had to eat all the ice cream in the freezer, which is always a terrible expectation to be faced with in your new workplace.
Talking of workplace expectations (and external stresses such as unplanned power cuts), we discovered what our main summer project is! The brief, in short, is to use artificial intelligence in order to create happiness and productivity within the workplace. Yet with such an expansive challenge, where do we begin?
The issue of happiness within the workplace is becoming a hot topic amongst millennial employers, with more and more businesses priding themselves on putting their own people first. The thing that I admire most about the brief that Made by Many have set is not to simply tap into a new demographic or audience to sell to, but it stems from a deep rooted concern for the issues that employees find themselves on a daily basis. The company’s awareness of this issue has been a recurring theme in my fortnight at the office so far. For instance, Made by Many host Minds@Work, an event that aims to bring speakers and professionals from around London together to discuss mental wellbeing and happiness within the workplace. It is designed to bring people together, developing an understanding of the pressures of the workplace whilst simultaneously opening up an avenue of conversation for people to share and reflect on their past experiences.
This has lead us to our first interview with Kevin, cut short by the weather. Kevin helps facilitate Minds@Work, and he had many insights on our brief, some of which will inform our research in the coming weeks. His knowledge on the subject allowed us to focus more on things that we had already developed in our desk research, such as the idea of the ‘quantified self’ and the idea that happiness is the by-product of doing something that you love, an important thing to think about when designing for people who may find themselves in an environment doing something that they do not enjoy.
So far, we have cut the brief down to topics which we are all interested in, with our main topics of interest being stress, work-life balance (something that I have fervently championed to the hilarity of Thomas and Niklas) and the impact that technology has had upon our social interactions and burgeoning anxieties. Thomas has also been investigating potential API’s and technologies we could use to develop the project, addressing the “how” of the Artificial Intelligence aspect of the brief.
So far, so good! Our next steps are taking our desk research a step further and conducting 1 on 1 interviews with professionals involved in mental health. We’re getting to the point now where it feels that desk research can only get us so far, and we’re looking forward to hearing some real life accounts and opinions on our areas of research so far — by the end of the week we aim to be focusing on a specific area for the brief and thinking more about an experience that we can offer a user.
// Jack, Design Intern
