As clients, friends, and family know - this past Monday was Arkatechture's official 4th birthday! Our Fun Committee (yes, we have a committee dedicated to Arka-fun) secretly planned a day outside of the office and, to suit Arkatechture's competitive nature, made a game of it!
For Arka Day, we developed a team-based scavenger hunt around Portland featuring tasks like "Find a data viz in the wild" and "go to a prior Arkatechture office location." We kept score by making everyone take pictures of each quest, and posting them to our special Arka Day Instagram account!
Each team was randomly chosen the morning of and made up of 3-4 Arkabots. While everyone got the same Arka Day t-shirt (which you may have seen if you were in Portland!), each team had a different color bandana to accesorize with. And, of course, each team was named after Maine-related things: Lobster, Moose, Seagull, Blueberry, and Pinecone!
If you're just looking through the Instagram feed, you might be a little confused. We used hashtags and numbered each task to keep track of who accomplished what - for data quality purposes! Here's a list of all of the challenges and some of the great pictures taken for them:
Team Blueberry visited our former office in South Portland with two thumbs up!
Arkatechture is a little notorious for unconventional interviews, and at least one member on each team had their job interview at an off-site location. For example, here's Team Seagull members recreating Amy Elliott's interview at Ri Ra!
This challenge ended up making or breaking some teams, since there was no limit on how many submissions you could make. Team Moose got 3 points for this picture at Envirovantage, where we did application development work!
Since we've had a few offices around Southern Maine, team members had lots to choose from - including Margaritas, The Pottery Place Cafe, and Ricetta's - where Team Blueberry took their picture!
This one was kind of a trick, since we didn't explicitly say what year Arkatechture was founded - it was up to each team to remember! There were definitely some creative submissions for this one, but I have to rep Team Pinecone for killing two birds with one stone by getting exactly $20.12 worth of gas!
Up until now, the challenges were pretty simple and straighforward. This challenge required the teams to be a bit more adventurous! We loved this artsy submission from Team Seagull - the excellent usage of Instagram filters just makes it!
This one allowed our team to get a little creative and keep their eye out for visualizations of data while they were out scavenging. Team Pinecone found this awesome coffee infographic at Coffee By Design, just around the corner from our office!
One of our sillier challenges, but every team managed to step up (on top of eachother) in front of this iconic Portland statue. Appropriately, here's Team Lobster's Lobsterman pyramid:
At Arkatechture, we greatly value doing good for our community. The Arka team did some great deeds today, like saving a runaway dog, giving directions to visitors, and paying for others' coffee - but we all found Team Seagull's video of Arkabot Ben Richey dramatically picking up some litter was easily the most entertaining!
Huge shout out to the Jonathan Douglas Salon, which is located in one of our old offices, who tolerated a lot of our shenanigans - and even swapped business cards with a few of us, like in this pic with Team Moose member Chris Bond!
This challenge required team members to check out what was trending on Twitter and make a post about it! Team Lobster saw that the Patriots were trending, so team member Katie Paige snapped a pic with a mannequin sporting a Patriots logo!
If you follow any of our vizzers on Twitter or are active in the Tableau community, you've probably heard of #MakeoverMonday where vizzers take to Tableau Public to visualize the same set of data.
However, for this challenge we asked the Arkabots to take #MakeoverMonday literally and makeover a team member! Team Seagull members Ryan Smith and Ben Richey looked snazzy in their made-over outfits.
This challenge was one of the few that didn't require a photo, but at least one person from each team managed to accomplish this! Almost every Arkabot is on Twitter, so be sure to follow us!
There are so many parks in Portland, so it would be a shame not to include them in our scavenger hunt! It was around this challenge that I started regretting not bringing my selfie-stick. All of our teams managed to get everyone in the picture, no selfie-stick needed, like this picture with all of Team Blueberry!
In case you didn't know, all of our conference rooms are named after famous sci-fi spaceships! We're all pretty geeky here at Arkatechture, and we aren't afraid to show it. Team Pinecone found this vintage book about space travel at, appropriately, Pinecone + Chickadee!
This challenge is a reference to an inside joke we have at Arkatechture. One of our Software Engineers, Chris Reed, has the nickname "creed" since that ends up being his username in a lot of our internal applications (first initial + last name).
This is another challenge that produced some very silly content, so definitely check the rest of these out! Team Lobster killed this challenge with some dramatic camera work.
Another challenge that didn't require a photo, our teams brought back stuffed animals, candy, and postcards!
Just to be clear, this challenge was not to literally find actual living wild moose, lobsters, etc. After accidentally taking a picture with a statue of an elk, Team Moose made up for it by snapping a selfie at Bullmoose!
If you've seen any of our laptops - you know we love Arka-branded stickers! We also love seeing them everywhere we go. After designing a brand new Arka sticker just for Arka Day, we gave each team one to place somewhere around Portland. Team Seagull placed theirs on the frame of this public bulliten board!
We got some amazing, insightful answers to this question! The most impressive answer was from this stranger that Team Blueberry found:
One thing that made Arka Day extra special, was that it was our newest employee's first day. Jess Dugas, our new Marketing Coordinator, took one for Team Pinecone and chugged a seltzer! Welcome to the team, Jess!
While the primary goal of the Arka Day activities was to have fun, we had to do something with data. So, each team was required to drive a car with an Automatic installed to track where each team went and how well they drove. We also tracked how many steps everyone took using FitBits, and we gave bonus points at the end for whichever team got the most steps, or ended the day with the highest Automatic driver score.
And, of course, we turned everything into a viz!