Back to All Meeting Notes

Team Meeting Notes 01

September 13 - 15 Team Meetings

Team Meeting Objectives The main goals of this team meeting are to develop your team's organizational structure, elect team officers, and continue the process of product opportunity exploration, building upon your individual brainstorming. You're working towards the 6 ideas milestone. Summary: You will elect officers and brainstorm What’s due?

Individual: at least 10 ideas in design notebooks, top 5 concepts with sketches (photocopied twice to hang up during session and give one copy to instructor)
Team: Officer form filled out

Key takeaways from this weeks lectures and tutorials (refresh at beginning of lab)

Introduction to the processes of product design
Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.
Problems and opportunities. Creativity and idea generation.

Primer: Expectations for All Team Meetings Team meetings are to begin promptly, 5 minutes after their nominal starting time. Punctuality is an important aspect of teamwork so showing up on time is essential. This applies to both students and instructors. If you are late and people are waiting, you are wasting their time. Students and instructors must attend all team meetings. If you will be missing a team meeting, please make advanced arrangements so that your teammates can adjust accordingly. Please let your instructor know that you will be away. In a typical team meeting, roughly 2/3 of the time will be spent giving progress updates and planning next steps, and at least 1/3 of the team meeting time will be spent working on project tasks. Preparation Before Team Meeting 1 Please review the course website well enough to recall the project workflow. Review the topics under the team manual menu carefully, and in particular the team officer roles — electing officers is an important part of the first lab. Think about roles that you would like to assume on your team. Be sure to have prepared your ideation deliverable (at least 10 ideas in notebook and 5 idea concepts. Please bring a copy of each of your idea concept sketches to your team meeting. This can be your original sketch on loose-leaf paper or a photocopy of a page from your design notebook. It will be pinned up. Review the tutorial on brainstorming in groups so that you are familiar with the process. If there is time, you will do additional idea generation during lab. Be prepared to give a short summary presentation about the project opportunities that you saw at the ideas fair (~5 minutes per project). Team Meeting 1 Activities Distribute the student and staff name cards. Ideally the instructors will distribute these around the table before everyone arrives for the team meeting. The name cards will be in a designated location in the team meeting room. At the end of each team meeting, the name cards should be collected and put back at the designated location. Brief introductions around the table should be made. In addition to name, introductions might include special interests or skills, and what you hope to gain through 2.009. The instructors and mentors should also briefly say what they do and describe their interests. Students should present the short summaries they prepared for each of the projects they were assigned to at the idea fair Review the descriptions of officer positions for the team (see course website) You may want to use the provided LCD screens during the team meeting to display the instructions on this page and to help structure your process. Identify persons in your section that are interested in the system integrator position. Allow each person to briefly say why they want to be a system integrator. Develop a schedule for the candidate system integrators to rotate through during the first few weeks of the course. Each candidate should have at least one week to try out the position. When the tryout rotation is complete, the team can vote on a permanent system integrator. Ideally this would be no later in the term than the sketch model milestone. Now, the first system integrator in the rotation should take on the responsibility for running the rest of the team meeting, as well as ensuring that minutes for today’s team meeting are taken and stored on the team google drive. The minutes for today’s team meeting should include the table constructed during team introductions and all decisions from the remainder of the team meeting. This will include choices for team officers and results from an idea clustering exercise. Files should be uploaded to your google drive. Elect one person in your section for each of the team officer positions. If more than one person is interested in an officer position, a weekly trial rotation as described for the system integrator may be used. Please use a democratic election process that has been agreed upon by the section. Each officer needs to understand their responsibilities in detail. It may be helpful to project the role description for each officer under consideration. Once you have selected officers, please fill in the form on the website. The course staff will use this information for setting up course mailing lists and peer reviews, etc.. Note: financial officers will need to attend a credit card orientation session and a rfp training session. Information officers will need to attend a session with the librarians. System integrators will attend a communications workshop. There will also be workshops for yodas and video log officers scheduled in the coming weeks. Please check the syllabus for training dates. Spend about 1/2 of the team meeting looking at the ideas you prepared for the individual brainstorming deliverable. Each team member should pin up and briefly describe their ideas (push pins will be provided). Please include your user-observation/scenario that inspired the idea in your discussion, along with the user/user-need. What's the idea's value proposition? Then, go through the exercise of working en-masse (and silently) to classify the ideas into a small set of similar ideas. Then give descriptive names to the clusters. Tip: At this stage, the goal is not to eliminate or select specific ideas and implementation paths. We don't know enough about the opportunities and needs that they represent. Our goal is to identify general sets of opportunities for further investigation. Ideas should be clustered based upon the need/issue, not the embodiment envisioned in the sketches. At this stage the sketches are really just ways to help tangibly "see" an opportunity. Once you have the clusters named, you will want to decide which idea areas are of the most interest for additional exploration. You might give each section member three stickies and allow them to vote to identify the section's top four areas. This should provide guidance on the areas that are most interesting to the team. If there is enough time, conduct a group brainstorming session to generate additional ideas within your four chosen areas. The main goal before next week will be to gather information in preparation for the 6 ideas presentation. Before next week the team will need to do background work for its chosen idea areas (possible customers and their key needs, relevant existing products, market potential, more product ideas, and some technical feasibility analysis). Of course, if something new and interesting comes up in the process of your research, that new direction can be explored as well. Remember: The research and idea generation during this phase of the project is very important because it will determine your team's direction for the entire term. Divide the team into task forces as needed. Clarify what the different groups are to deliver and how the system integrator will facilitate coordination between the different task forces. Other Notes A TA will bring you out to the Pappalardo Lab during/after your team meeting to take your pictures (and maybe do a quick video). These pictures will be put on your team webpage (protected behind a login). If you have class immediately after your team meeting, please email the TAs (2009ta22@mit.edu) to make alternate arrangements. Ad-hoc Task Forces The full team is needed to tackle the problem of developing the product concept and alpha prototype in roughly 3 months. However, it is rare that all members will be able to simultaneously work together on the same thing. Throughout the development process, the team will typically divide into ad-hoc task forces ;with different responsibilities. Each task force is a mini-group with 2-4 members typically. One of the main functions of the weekly team meetings is project coordination through the sharing of information between task forces, making group decisions, and terminating, adjusting, or forming new task forces to address current project demands. The system integrators are responsible for coordinating the ad-hoc task forces and facilitating the task force definition process. Physical Notebooks In general, notebooks should be either a 8.5 x 11 spiral-bound book (to make scanning easier) or a standard-bound engineering notebook. Unlined notebooks are preferred. Please obtain an appropriate notebook by the end of the first week of class. Use your design notebook to document all of your work and contributions towards your team's project. The notebook will also be used for a required reflection entry after each project milestone. You should always bring your up-to-date notebook to team meetings and any project-related activities. Please do not use the notebook for lecture notes. Notebooks are working documents, but they must provide a comprehensible trail for your product development effort. Illegible notebooks will receive a poor grade. Please be sure to write the date on each page when you make entries and use indelible ink. Design notebooks are legal documents.

2.009 Home

Information

Milestones

Team Info