MEEBA

While working in a collaborative environment, finding the right group balance can be difficult. MEEBA (Meeting Balance) is a modular device positioned on a meeting table, composed of a central station and individual elements (Meebits). MEEBA is able to recognize participation, and reacts with light to give all participants a chance to have their say. Through the scannable NFC chips in the Meebits, users can read about their collaboration style throughout the meeting. This reflection can help them to adapt accordingly to create a more balanced meeting dynamic

The Vitality squad has given me a lot of growth during this project. My main focus was to create, improve & better everyday life through design. By working towards improving group work by personal feedback, I feel that with MEEBA I have worked towards my vision of making this accessible through design. The coaches and my group pushed me just in the right direction, which helped me realize new techniques to go through the design process. By doing a lot of iterative sketching, prototyping and brainstorming, I already felt I had achieved more insight in project work when the midterm arrived compared to my last project.

After going through this experience, I want to highlight two things especially that I want to take with me in future projects. The first is about being critical about you direction and allowing yourself to make decisions early on, having in mind that you can always go back. Throughout the project there were often moments where goals were unclear, too broad or problematic in different areas of feasibility. I wanted to focus on more involvement with users and developing my competence with technology, as mentioned in my PDP goals. While I did an user test and made most the technology for MEEBA, the time and current situation (due to Covid-19) unfortunately did not allow us to use our final prototype in a design, as well as finish up our NFC system. Looking back, the latter could maybe have been possible if we had decided to take some design choices sooner. Unsure about design directions, we wasted a lot of time too afraid to act. Yet, through squad activities like the 100-sketches challenge and helpful coach meetings, I gradually felt more confident to actually act upon decisions. After the midterm gave a lot of (positive) feedback, we acted a lot quicker with design choices, which resulted in more realizations, understanding and re-designs. Because of this development, our final result became so much more advanced and thought-through. It would still be nice to see if we can actually realize the technology if we could continue this project with Ahrend (a company that approached us during Demo Day with interest in MEEBA). This could also evolve my competence with user-testing and understanding of technology as a part of design, as these are still my points of interest as a designer.

The other learning point for me was that, however nice the group balance is, you still have to think through the planning and task division in time. As for my group, everyone seemed to work on their areas personally within the group context, making for a nice balance. We faced some difficulties that we needed to overcome, but we improved evidently over time as we had a great environment together were we openly discussed our issues. The obstacle we mostly faced was due to switching a lot between different meeting methods. In the beginning, we made agendas for each meeting, switching responsibilities and noted what we had done. It proved to be really nice to look back on what we did, yet we couldn’t maintain this organized after a while. In the end we switched to Notion to create an overview of our tasks, but even that was not checked and updated regularly. So, it was a bit all over the place. We did manage, yet with all these methods I think it is best to agree on one in the beginning, and try to stick to that till the end to prevent chaos or losing overview.

Throughout this course, these important experiences not only learned me a whole lot to deal with uncertainty, it also was this uncertainty that brought me closer to the other group members, resulting in a new group dynamic experience and better results because of it. I am thankful for the experience, my lovely group and the raised awareness about the importance of these aspects for me as a designer.