Thunk

Thunk was an intended as much as a social experiment as it was a test of the teams knowledge and skills in web development and UI/UX design. The team was intrigued by how users interacted with one another as well as what made interactivity "fun". The challenge we put on ourselves over the six month project was to develop a social game that would engage users to interact with one another.

Settling on the idea of divergent thinking, Thunk was inspired by a creative exercise conducted at the Rhode Island School of Design by Industrial Design professor Cas Holman. The premise became encouraging users to develop as many solutions to a prompt in a given amount of time. In the research phase, the team had discovered that many other social games accepted only one response per prompt which in many cases limited a user's creative potential in that moment. Following our inspiration from Holman, we found that in our initial testing users were able to generate as many as ten responses to a given prompt in a thirty second period. Our test users revealed that they may not have been happy with every response they created, but enjoyed the fact that they were able to generate as many responses as they did. They reported that it allowed them to maintain a flowing train of thought rather than second guessing themselves on their response over the same time interval in other games.

The name Thunk is derived from applying an incorrect past-tense conjugation to the word think in a similar manner to how sink becomes sunk in the past tense. As a team we believed that it embodied the concept of divergent thinking, but making the concept approachable and entertaining.

My role throughout the project was to serve as the project manager. In this role I maintained our project timeline utilizing Monday.com as our project management software, scheduled meetings and took minutes, and oversaw task assignments each week to the team. This role tested my leadership skills and forced me to grow as the project progressed. Team management became multi-facetted as I incorporated team morale and wellbeing into my weekly check-ins. I added conflict management to my toolbox as clashes in ideas and work styles and ethics began to develop with the project; an unfortunate development, but one that we overcame as a team due to our tight knit background with one another.

Additionally, I assisted on both the User Experience and Development teams. During the initial phases of the project I was deeply entrenched with developing interview practices and establishing group testing scenarios. The team was dedicated to interacting with prospective users from the first day of ideation for the project to encourage communication and spark interest in the final product. Later in the project I shifted to front end development working to bring the various screen states to code from our Figma prototype. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to work on the back end systems for this project as much of the core functionality was completed prior to my shift to development.