We’re moving from ideation phase to action phase this week so I’ve been adding daily bullet points and grouping them together throughout the week.
Monday
We pitched our idea about a “HAPPY” organization for unemployed workers during tutorials today, which is a speculative futuristic company recruiting workers whose jobs have been taken by technological products. We summarized 5 personas according to research: the boss, the manager, the chef, the waiter, and the designer.
David suggested that for our primary research, we pitch Google and other companies a website with our project information, as well as set up accounts on different social media platforms. I love this suggestion because websites and social media accounts are more efficient and has an audience from a worldwide spectre. Though I suspect it won’t be as easy to carry out as we had planned.
Tuesday
In our group discussion today we separated our roles (research, interview, website, video), and planned to piece everything together in our process of individually finishing our work. Personally I was having some problems in deciphering the importance of the process when I was actually creating part of the outcome (I chose to create the layout of our website and I automatically switched into the muscle-memory of getting everything perfect instead of focusing on the process and making everything low-tech). It’s a weird feeling to balance the importance of process and outcome, since both are important in their own way.
I maintain that we’ll still need off-line, face-to-face interviews even if we’re pitching a website as well as a social media platform into the world and target whatever companies that fits into the genre of hospitality and tech. And we need to do that FAST.
(I’m seriously planning on just grabbing people when I go to a restaurant, but that might not be wise due to ethical terms).
We also need to target one member of every company like David suggested during tutorials.
Wednesday
We had a lecture that focused on agency and social rights which was really helpful not only to our group project, but also to me as an individual in life. With Sasha’s help, I learned that agency is the feeling of control, of action and consequences. If one doesn’t have agency in an environment or situation, one feels uncomfortable in that scenario. Which led me to ask the question about how hospitality workers felt about technology taking over human labour, and how tech workers felt about the fact that the technology they were helping to create is slowly taking over their own jobs.
Sasha also mentioned that the Worker of the Future would have to be a “Superhero” with all the superheroey traits like multiple skills and maximum time management, but also humane traits like determination and courage. If we put this character into our speculative future, this persona would have to be the group of workers who haven’t been replaced by technology. I am currently unsure of the reason of that, but I’m guessing that they had adapted a new form of agency with the relation of AI and tech to feel comfortable enough to train it and collaborate with it instead of being anxious of it replacing them. I’m marking this down for interviews and the content of the website, focusing on how our interviewees felt about the increase of technology in the workspace.
We had a group discussion this week to set out different tasks for everybody. I’m really glad that our group has a rather Athena approach to progressing our project(Athena means we view ourselves as an entire group instead of individuals with different roles, learned from Richard’s lecture on Wednesday nights) and would help each other out with our initially assigned tasks. The Group Journal on Miro was constantly updated during our progress.
After the discussion, I had a chat with Louason, who kindly retold me the entire theory of HAPPY and I documented his words below in this map.
Thursday
We had a slight adjustment to our schedule because we wanted to add a 3D sculpture into the project initially but we ditched the idea because time is running out. We had to balance interest/interaction and time as we move forward into the assessment phase.
We also started interviewing people from hospitality and tech industries that we could access and add the results into our research.
Friday & Saturday
Still updating on our progress. Starting to feel a bit stressed out because I couldn’t see the bigger picture of the project when I’m focused on getting the details right. I’m anxious about time running out and whether we are on the right path, and I think I need some time to take a step back and look at our project from a wider scale in integrity as well as look throughout the timeline on how we developed what we have in our hands now.
(We also had an instagram account that has been created since Tuesday and we’re still working on the details on how to manage it. My personal opinion is to make it an immersive and interactive experience, indicating that we are recruiting new workers for HAPPY and we are advertising online.)
Additional thoughts about the Incubator next Thursday. Whatever research we have yet to gather we can gather during the Incubator when there are people present and actively participating so we can easily get access to them.
Sunday
Someone from a hospitality company had agreed to take part in an interview with me on Monday afternoon. As Khyathi and Jim had both interviewed workers from a tech and design background, I aim to collect information from the hospitality part of the scenario and find out how they feel about the development of technology and how it has impacted their working environment.