#project community

Design Teams, Work Teams, Creative Teams, Sports teams, or structural teams all have one thing in common. They take individuals skill & energy and turn them into a combined effort to accomplish a common goal. The idea that working together can have greater benefits for the collective than working individually has been clear to humans since the beginning of hunter & gatherer societies. We could even say, that our very distant mammal relatives, the Chimpanzee's had already figured this out. Although this example takes it a bit far, the idea behind it is clear; Collaboration is a quintessential to Human progress.

However intuitive & important teamwork might be in our society, it is not always as simple as we would like to think. Efficient team management starts by addressing individual needs of the team. In order to understand the many different levels of needs people can have, I like to use Maslow's Hierarchy of needs to break up this aspect of human psychology. When using this hierarchy as a structure to map out individual needs, we can start seeing a relationship between peoples needs & their living situation. 

Hello guys, I would like to introduce some interesting and useful online tools to you, wish those tools could help you a lot in life and work.

  QQ

Almost everyone in my life circle are using QQ, it is the most popular personal communications app in history: over one billion registered users across 80+ countries.

QQ is an app that has so many functions: free voice chats, video calls, rich texting, blog, music, free movies, and games.

China is one of the regional expertise centers of Solidaridad network, so I believe they already used QQ as their contact tools.

I think you guys will very interest in QQ，if you want to make Chinese friends and know about Chinese culture or contact with your Chinese partners, download it and you will love it. This is the websites address to download international QQ( http://www.imqq.com/download/)，it is all in English.

   2. SketchUp

It is 3D modeling software that's easy to learn and incredibly fun to use.

As IDE student, the third year’s student told me that we will use it very frequently in our design assignment, and I already start to learn it, it is a free software and very easy to use.

This summer break, my father asked me to design the interior trim of our new home, this software really easy  for new users.

 3. SAI

It is a software for Wacom board drawing, there are many friend of me are using Wacom board but they always use Photoshop to drawing, I think SAI is specialized focus on drawing, easy to select color, many kind of pen and paper.

 4. Photoshop

It is a very useful software for designing and making poster.  

I don’t really good at Ps but it will to be our tool to using in our assignment, I am going to satudy it.

5. AotuCAD

AutoCAD is a software application for 2D and 3D computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting, I think it won’t very useful in our program.

6. Keynote

It is an APP of IOS system, very useful for me, there are many different style of form board of PowerPoint, next year I did many presentation, it made my preparing work easily.

7. Class table

This is an app about weekly plan, you can add everything that you want to finished in this week, for example: get up 7:30am，finish blog before Tuesday evening.. it will alarm you before the due time.

  For our project, I am going to learn video editing software, I knew Miriam are good at it, I will study from her and I really interesting in it. I also want to learn Google hangouts and Google +, it will use in every weeks in this term, it’s a very good way of distance meeting.

Hope my share is useful for you and our project!

  See you next week!

  1.       How do you understand our class goals?

I think our goal is to understand communities and networks as a team, how communities and networks can support innovative design. I believe through the process of teamwork, we will have new insight of designing because we sharing our idea to group member, we listen to each other and compare our ideas, then we get the most practical idea to do our work , we can learn many ideas from others as well as many technology design skill.

  2.       What do you need and want to learn as you/we explore the different themes from application of online communities and networks to open innovation design?

I want to learn Google Hangout like yesterday during the lesson, it is very useful and interest, and we put our question on Meetingword in different color by different group, everything are very new for me, now I am using Tumblr to write blog and it will shows on our group page, there are many thing I need to learn and I am very interesting in every new online technology tools.

  3.       What would you like the outcome of your team’s project to look like?

I expect our project can be remembered by everyone who looks at our work. It would not only look like a finished project but also a perfect surprise. Our project will include creativity and innovative.

  4.       What “specialty quality” will you bring and contribute?

     Wow. Time flies quite fast, we’re now already in our third week! This week, the students are asked to dive into a “closer to the ground” practices group size and its impact on open and innovative design. Personally, I think that this topic speaks more to me rather than the other topics since it’s related to my group’s theme: Work Team. So, this is my reflection about this week.

What is working well for you in your group? The first thing that works well, for me, in the group 3 will be our division of labour. After having read our weekly team activity together, we equally divide the task and also decide the deadline for the final group assignment between us. Usually, we first make some research personally and then share and stabilize our idea with someone who does this research in the same area and finally give the end result of the research to our co-ordinator. (similar to what Chris shared in the week 3 video! :p) Up until now, I think that this method operates well. Then, the communication is the second thing that makes the functioning of this group runs smoothly. I’m always up-to-date about the task, about other members’ questions, about new tasks, etc. Personally, I think that Facebook is a great tool for communicating between group members BUT not necessarily a good platform since it also provides personal communication between the user, their friends, their family... We slowly believe that this could become more and more distracting and... we finally decided to opt for a new platform called Basecamp! *finger crossing*

The last significant aspect from this group is our group size. In my opinion, this size of group of 5 is the best, every member is reachable and can easily speak up. As Christopher said in his website: “In my opinion it is at 5 that the feeling of "team" really starts. At 5 to 8 people, you can have a meeting where everyone can speak out about what the entire group is doing, and everyone feels highly empowered. However, at 9 to 12 people this begins to break down -- not enough "attention" is given to everyone and meetings risk becoming either too noisy, too boring, too long, or some combination thereof. Although I've been unable to find the source, I've heard of some references to a study from the 1950s that says that the optimum size for a committee is 7. Likewise, it's fairly easy for us to see and agree that a dinner party starts to break down somewhere above 7 or 8 people, as do also tabletop games of both the strategic (I prefer 5) and role-playing varieties (I prefer 7). These size limits can be overcome, but require increased amounts of "grooming". What is challenging you? What is challenging about group work, for me, is the idea of collecting ideas from other people and how to bring those ideas all together to finally come up with single idea that will embody every member’s idea, not merely one’s idea. What is one thing you might do differently in the coming weeks? If I have to think about one thing that I may do differently in the coming weeks to improve my experience and group’s work is trying to perfectionize my personal research and to maximize the use of tools that might be helpful to the group work such as Basecamp.

(I’m apologize for the late post, problem with OBA’s WiFi connection.)

"Think about your own networks."

Wait… what? Which networks? Well, I have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber.. But wait, can we also consider Skype or Viber as ‘network’? (They’re officially software or application, but since I use them to interact with people, not only family but also, friends, colleagues etc., they can also be called MY network, can’t they?)

     Nowadays, it’s hard to define a ‘network’. It can be everything as long as it involves interactions between its users. In my opinion, I used to consider Skype or WhatsApp as informal networks in regard to social learning. Categorizing them as ‘real’ networks seems to be a bad idea. But after doing some research about the real definition of ‘network’, and also what differentiates it with ‘community’, I came up to the conclusion that applications such as Skype or WhatsApp connect the users and therefore can be called ‘network’.

·  The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants, viewed as a set of nodes and links, with its affordances for information flows and helpful linkages.

·  The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic that represents a collective intention—however tacit and distributed—to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it.

(source: http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/communities-versus-networks/)

     No one can deny the importance of these networks. They can be used either for individual usage (for example: research, self-study, harvest information), either for collaborative usage (group research, interaction with group members, document sharing).

     Personally, I equally use them for both usages. I used Facebook as one of my personal network and also belong to some groups on Facebook, mostly used for updating group works and adding some group files. It’s even harder to set the limit between individual and collaborative usage since the most influential social networks like Facebook or Twitter are emerging to become a ‘new’ tool for collaborative work thanks to its easy-to-reach, useful aspect (for example, file uploading files on Facebook). So, it might be a really good idea to merely work on one online space like Asana or Basecamp for the group work.

     Speaking about the most valuable, I would say that the usage of networks for collaborative works is way more valuable than individual usage. We can’t really call it ‘network’ if it’s limited to personal information harvesting, if there’s no linkage between people, if it provides no interaction between users. 

     Finally, the new area that I would like to explore by experiencing with my online networks is Business. I would really love to use my online networks for the business usage. But since I couldn’t currently ‘jump’ into this, I did some research about tools that might be helpful for my future plan to explore this new area. This is also one of my group tasks: doing a research about an application called Zoho. This application looks great for the business intention: it provides the website building and is useful to run our own business processes, manage the information and be more productive!

I’m looking forward to exploring this platform in the future; it is unfortunately not free for now!

First of all, I honestly have to admit that the first Project Community class with Nancy White was quiet confusing. We talked about mixed things: social networks, international development… I was puzzled about what are we going to learn. Later on, I read Nancy’s post about “the power of confusion in learning” and it’s relieving to know that it’s actually normal to be confused, to know that I’m on the right track. I think the aim of this first class is to guide us to be confused about what we’re going to learn in order to trigger our sense of curiosity about the exploration of communities and networks in open design engineering.

To answer to this question, I started to collect people’s suggestion about websites that could be useful in service of innovative and open design engineering, and also in online collaborative works: - Basecamp (thanks Bart Hoekstra!), useful to organize group collaboration in ONE single page. But unfortunately we need to pay for this. ;( - Asana, same mechanism as Basecamp, but free for up to 30 members! Yay!