Group 1 - NanoHacking-UNILI

To start

To start a productive collaborative work, and put the team in the same mood and find an easier way to get to know each other, we used the Frog Collective Action Tool [1]. It is a method of how a future team memebers can get to know each other, define their strengths and weaknesses, to know what are the common interests and foseter a friendly environment for further design process.

Firstly...

Firstly, we had papers to write down our names (true one or the one that we want to be called), state some relevant skills, recent achievements and our overall interests. It is important to write it down, so that if a person had difficulties in communication, it would be easier for him to start interaction with others by simple reading. You can write bullet points, draw something or even crumple your papers to "visualize" yourself - feel free in the way of expression. Each member tells shortly what he wrote and it is good to ask some questions back to start communication and involvement. Afterwards it is useful to pin the papers around you to have a nice atmosphere.

Next step

Next step was writing questions we are interested in, regarding our topic: "Speculative futures in nanotechnology". The question can be big or small, the end purpose is to place the questions around and get the feedback. So, the groupmate afterwards read each others questions and try to answer them. Surely, you can put a question as an answer or skip the question, if you do not know the answer. It is done to start the dialogue and rise up some themes. On the pictures you might see the questions we were interested in and what kind of a feedback we all got. It is argued that some outer people, involved in the process of answering the question can provide more input for further consideration. When all (or almost all) answers were written, we gather them and start reading and discussing them. Some questions or answers had to be secondly explained, because of misunderstanding and so on.

Working with quantity

To make the next move we separated our group into small subgroups, took the questions and tried to come up with some topics that were somehow pointed out in the questions. It is more like brainstorming and just throwing out numerous ideas and inspirations. It is good to write the themes on some small notes, because the next step is to sort the ideas according to the complexity of their realization. Finally, we started to discuss the topics and how much we are excited about each of them. To choose the topic, each of us picked 3 topics we liked mostly and graded them from 1 to 3.