Move Around Your Mind
Qianfan Guo + Christine Shi, Professor Dan Taeyoung, TA Adam Vosburgh,
METATOOL Columbia GSAPP Fall 2019
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Making the right architecture decisions, understanding their rationale and interpreting them correctly during development is essential to building a system that satisfies stakeholder expectations. As the design evolves, making new architecture decisions and removing obsolete ones to satisfy changing requirements while maintaining harmony with the existing decisions are crucial to teamwork.
Architecture decision making is considered one of the most challenging cognitive tasks in group work. Most of the time when we are trying to make design decisions, we speak up about our opinions, talk about pros and cons and try to read teammates’ facial expressions of whether they want to make some changes to the design or not.
The objective of this tool is to explore a new way of communicating with your teammates. With a concept of “hide and seek” in mind, the illustration of a circle (or any geometry) represents different design choices. When one is interested in one particular object or idea, he/she can take a step closer to the object, and then the circle will slowly grow bigger as more people approach it. However, if we assume the total interest in these different options laid on the table remains the same, then as one circle grows bigger, the rest will shrink. Eventually, a circle where no one is interested in looking anymore, it will disappear. What differentiates this method from a traditional way of communicating ideas is that the users can easily see the physical movement of their teammate’s thinking progress on the table. With the illustration of growing and shrinking circles, this tool also hopes to engage people to interactively taking the opinions of the team members into consideration, encouraging teams to make architecture decisions collaboratively and efficiently.
