Today we met as a group to talk about working agreements and affinity map for our topic.
Part 1: Working agreements
Our first assignment as a team was to come up with a working agreement.
The working agreement can use in any circumstance. It can be used with only two-person or many as a whole company. This working agreement can be at a high level, or it can be low and specific. For example, Be honest vs. use Slack as a primary communication tool. The purpose of the work agreement is to set up the same mindset when it comes to collaboration. Especially working within a group may cause conflict when we don’t communicate. And even if we talk, someone might have a stronger voice than the other. Planning out the agreement is the first page to start a project.
This is our working agreements:
Working Agreements
- Open to listening to one another
- Avoid last-minute work/ meet up
- Meet deadlines
- It’s okay to eat/drink in meetings
- Flexible work / meet on time
- Give feedback respectfully
- Equal work effort
- Subject to change
- Honest about strengths, weakness
- Slack as a main communication tool
- Communicate changes/ issues
- Delegate with time to spare
- Five fingers voting
- When things / people fail/ re-organize
- Document workflow
- Be on time
- Participate in a team meeting
- If you can’t make it, communicate with other teammates.
- Be responsible
- Use google doc/drive to share files
- Be instructive (when sharing)
Part 2: Affinity Map
After we agreed with our working agreements, we started off to our next step: affinity map. The affinity map is a method to gather all different ideas that may relate to your goal. The process of this method is simple. Set a time, about 15 minutes and come up with all the things that you can think of. It can be: experience, read, saw, heard, people, job, tool, company, color, feeling. It can be anything that comes up in your mind. For our team, the topic is the technology impact on society.
When I think of how technology has impacted our society, it can be an everyday object like our smartphone. It didn’t exist 12 years ago, but now most people have it. And behind the smartphone, there are data, the big data. It collects everything that we do on computers. I am fascinated but also creepy with this data. How are they collected? Where does all the data go? Who uses these data? Is it safe? What does secure mean?
The place I’m working is a media ad agency. Because we make revenue based on KPIs, I’ve had some experience of how these ads delivered to the audience. There is an upper funnel and lower funnel. The upper funnel ads target people who do not have the brand awareness. For the lower funnel, they know what the brand is, but they might not know what their product. This target audience can be specific. It can target by gender, geological location, age, brand awareness, etc. If the company is new, we brainstorm about what we want to tell it to the audience. It has to be blunt and clear about what the client would want sell.
From these experiences, the most surprising fact was that the media could drive to the people who share the same wifi. For example, if I was looking at the Bluetooth headphone, my sister might have the same ad that I was looking at. After I realize, I found out the website that I’ve been on was also showing on an Instagram ad a second later. I try to connect all my account because I hate remembering passwords. But because I share all my stuff in one account, it feels like it’s haunting me.
This is the results of our affinity map.
For this project, I’m interested in data, home tech, and vehicles. It is the start of the project. Hopefully, I could find the answer that I want to solve or at least I could understand why they exist.
