What is our platform about?
TalkPop is a digital toolkit that helps trainees learn techniques for communicating that will make their teamwork more collaborative and efficient by creating a safe space with active listening, honesty, and constructive feedback. This project is a partnership with the Digital Society School, which is part of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. During the development of our project, we’ve focused on the different inequalities that can arise between trainees on the groups at DSS, which is addressed on the Sustainable Development Goal 10 from the United Nations.
The 20-week traineeship attracts a broad range of trainees with a diverse cultural and educational background to work together in teams in collaboration with different partners to solve real-world, societal, design challenges. At the same time, team communication in this new digital era has made particular design activities more difficult. Activities such as reading non-verbal emotional cues from teammates, group participation, and delivering feedback might be challenging for some teams in an online environment. These activities are necessary for design teammates for fruitful discussions to progress and find success with their own project.
The following questions are meant to be addressed with this project: How might we design tools that help trainees work toward team psychological safety by practicing active listening, honest and constructive feedback, and collaboration? This obstacle is a broad question, and a long-term process as the online environments seem to be a more common scenario here to stay. After several chats we’ve had with the trainees and coaches from DSS, we encountered common struggles created by this online environment and the several communication gaps that have resurfaced during this digital era built up for the past few years. How can we do this by harnessing the playful affordances of the online working environment?
Our group has developed an online toolkit to support trainees with content on non-violent communication on a “peer to peer” structure, group activities, and a section for self-development. TalkPop, an online platform Working in teams is a really challenging process most of us go through at the workplace. Rebuild trust is necessary to move forward, and we built the platform to do it! Watch our video above and check out our booklet to know more about TalkPop or connect with us at talkpop@gmail.com or check our prototype .
