Week 4 Contact hours Activity 

Six Thinking Hats: A Tool to Strengthen Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity Skills

Source : http://www.debonoforschools.com/asp/six_hats.asp

Mockups

Reflective Journal Entry (Week 3):

Q1. What did you learn about your attitudes to working in a team? Which Belbin roles did you identify with?

A team is not a bunch of people with job titles, but a congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role which is understood by other members. Members of a team seek out certain roles and they perform most effectively in the ones that are most natural to them.

(Dr. R. M. Belbin)

Belbin Team Roles are used to identify people's behavioural strengths and weaknesses in the workplace. This information can be used to:

• ·         Build productive working relationships
• ·         Select and develop high-performing teams
• ·         Raise self-awareness and personal effectiveness
• ·         Build mutual trust and understanding
• ·         Aid recruitment processes

Q2. Were you surprised by either your Leadership or Team Score following the first quiz? Why/why not? You don't need to specify the scores that you received - rather was it higher/lower than you expected.

My Leadership scores were higher than I expected but Team scores were lower than I expected. That could be because I like to take control of the situations in the interest of the team and its goals.

Q3. Did you identify with any of the causes of conflict? Is it something you have a tendency to do or something you have experienced from previous team projects? How will you manage this if it occurs in this team project?

One of the cause can be misunderstanding and miscommunication but this can easily be resolved by proactive communication and that will help in better collaboration.

Q4. What is important to you when working in a team?

A pleasant and friendly working environment where each member respects and values other members of  the team and engages in active communication and participation.

First Mockup made by Khalfan AlFalasi

Reflective Journal Entry (Week 2):

During the contact session we were asked to write four design Ideas each and post it on white board. Our constraint was that we have to use Trove’s API in some way. http://trove.nla.gov.au/

Trove helps you find and use resources relating to Australia. It’s more than a search engine. Trove brings together content from libraries, museums, archives and other research organisations and gives you tools to explore and build.

Trove is many things: a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources.

Best of all, Trove is yours, created and maintained by the National Library of Australia.

(Source : http://trove.nla.gov.au/general/about)

Next was the brainstorming session in which we had to make different Major/sub-categories of those ideas and sort them under those categories and merge any two similar Ideas. Iterate through this process until you find the most suited idea that you think is implementable.

My Concept:

Create a website with crime maps and other interactive features. e.g. Hot spots, Maps, Timeline and Graphs etc.

This design concept involves fetching the data from Trove API and other sources and then manipulating that data to find trends and patterns in the data. Later cluster that in the form of Map representations.

Target user groups:

Potential home buyers, Researchers, Social workers, Law enforcement Agencies and community workers.

What is Design???

Design is to develop new and improved products.

Source : http://sealsdesigns.com/

Source : http://zurb.com/word/design-process

I miss my team :(

I hope I will find good people in this course as well.

Reflective Journal Entry (first week):

What I am expected to do in this course:

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be doing idea generation through brain storming. Also have to work and learn teamwork and as a team we have to reflect and refine different design ideas.  We have to critique each other’s ideas in a manner which is constructive and valuable.

And also hopefully by the end semester be able to deliver, as a team, a finished project.

 I want to learn new design techniques in new design space, I want to learn how to ideate and be able to explore range of solutions by learning new programing languages and tools.

Speaking about programing languages, I’m worried about that bit because I never enjoyed programing that much as I consider myself a Database guy.

I hope that I can overcome that weakness by doing this course

My expectations for this course:

My expectation of this course are very high and I think I will learn a lot through this studio course.

I hope through this course I can learn about the design process. Through this course, I hope to develop further understanding of the nature of design and the design process.

I hope to develop skills in the communication of design ideas, approaches and outcomes through a variety of forms. I am expecting to develop skills in the management of team-based projects, from a project and team perspective. So I am overly excited and a bit nervous.