Week 7: Communication workshop and Synthesis

IxD Graduate Design Studio| Carnegie Mellon University| Spring 2018

Planning

After the Confluence madness, we got back to the project activities. We continued planning for the Diary Studies for people who have been in the workforce for 6months-2years and the interviews with Managers/Recruiters. We were able to reach out to people and share it by Monday.

As a precursor to the workshop we sent out a survey to get insights about the painpoints/issues people have with communication skills in a professional setting. These included scenarios like communication for finding employment, have a difficult conversation with superiors, working in a team situation and lastly, technical and non-technical presentations. These were scenarios that we looked into in the workshop as well.

We got a good number of responses for our survey (50 so far!).

The workshop took some effort from all of us. We wanted to include students from various majors from CMU like engineering and sciences, Business, Humanities and creative fields like Design and Fine Arts. We found a number of people willing to participate from the school of design. However, getting other people took more work and some guerilla tactics from Denise, Melody and me in the Hunt Library and the UC.
Joe, Scott and me prepared worksheets/ props for the four activities that we had planned for the workshop. The research objectives for all the activities was to gather Pain points, Weaknesses,Strengths of people for professional communication.

The workshop

We managed to gather 13 people( mix of design, business and sciences) to join our workshop on Tuesday. We also had free dumplings!

As mentioned earlier, the workshop included four activities: Journey map, Sticky Scenario, Role Playing and Build your own Communication Tool.
The workshop came together pretty cohesively with all the team members pitching in to either conduct the activities or document the discussions. The participants were also enthusiastic so that helped in having some insightful discussions . One thing that we felt that could have improved was planning open discussions with more directed questions to get more precise feedback. Also, post the workshop, there were mixed feelings around the role playing activity. Participants felt that a little more context could have helped them. On the other hand, it was difficult for us to capture feedback from multiple pairs while they were engaged in the activity. The ‘Make your own Communication Tool’ was a lot of fun while giving us some points that could serve as jumping off place in the ideation phase.

Analysing

We’ve begun to get some responses from people on the Diary Study and the Interviews. A lot of work lies ahead for us. Sifting through the responses, worksheets and discussions kept us busy this weekend. We decided to divide up the task of going through individual data from the different groups among the team members. One of the challenges that I foresee will be to compare insights from different sources and formats. Some of them, like the survey, have more quantitative info while the journey maps, sticky scenarios and the communication tools will require some level of extrapolation .
On Sunday we will come together and share insights to start formulating design directions and putting together the results for this phase of the project.