With the incubators for testing on Thursday, this week seems to be crucial to our final presentation. I am not exaggerating but feel like my mood is on a roller coaster everyday because of all unexpected issues…

On Wednesday afternoon when I just planned to go with some reading for the final report, I found it hard to even read one line. Instead I documented some feelings in the past few days:

I was always trying to figure out what everyone in the group was thinking about. How Omar linked our theme with a union or a party? Why Nicky thought AI was highly relevant to our work? Why Chuxuan paid extra attention to our uses of different media (newspaper/poster/etc.) as artifacts?

We all have different cultural and educational background, and even though we almost stayed together everyday in the previous month, our different tasks within the group and sources of information are still different. Anyway, I hold the belief that the guarantee of adequate communication are the best solutions to reach an agreement.

But what happened on Wednesday in class indeed made me confused and depressed, with my mind wandering to things about collaboration.

I recalled the first week when I raised my discontent with hierarchical or pyramid structure which is ubiquitous in workplace and we showed our consensus on de-centralization. This week, however, I just realized the modes of de-centralization which is ubiquitous on campus are also imperfect, in lower efficiency of making decisions, in higher possibility of arousing debates.

Also I have to say it is regretful that we are still unable to get a clear arrangement for this unit even in the week 9. The collaboration in this unit, I believe, should not only exist within each group, but between all MACCC&MAAI students and staff.

For incubators on Thursday, as expected, we still need to elaborate our theme by ourselves to get precious insights from others, rather than just leaving our artifacts in the corner simply with a poll or anything interactive. My suggestion for the future is to stop the game of musical chairs and allow conversations to go deeper.

I consequently got some useful advice from peers:

• We should build our narratives for Jack or Union Jack: just defining them as  a group of people being multi-disciplined or versatile is still too vague (how will a Jack be like as a full-time worker / a freelancer / a slasher, give scenarios to make this ideology easier to be understood).
• Be cautious about the wording / image building. Take into account the gender (Union Jack and the image we build seem to have a tendency of masculinity).
• We should try to think how to use this ideology as a tool to tackle the current existing problem (for example, not only full-time workers in the workplace, but housework which is not paid).
• Everyone will love it, but what is the current problem? Think more about it.

Today, during the online tutorial session with Josh, we exchanged what we got from yesterday and found each one of us actually delivered differently about Union Jack. Still, communication matters. Our group is obviously in a low morale, with all the factors intertwining.

Hope this weekend can be a good remedy to our mood, to let us calm down and think more positively. Let me spray my cyber-lavender-mist to pillows of my dear teammates!