Constraints:
Overall I enjoyed the design charrette project, though I found it stressful to condense a project, especially a group project, to a 2 week period. Having only a 2 week period for my design process meant that I had to condense certain aspects of it, and also accelerate others. I feel as though I spent too much time focusing on just the logo, when the branding system as a whole was more important. As goes the provided topic, I actually very much enjoyed the duke beltline. It was nice getting out of the studio and doing research by experiencing a location, and additionally I enjoyed the chance to imagine what would be while creating our interventions and branding. I think in the case of this as a 2 week project, providing a topic worked better than developing our own.
I understand the opportunity for a larger sum of work to be done in group projects than one could just do alone, and the valuable experience it may give related to future work experiences, however in this project I felt my group could have had a better synergy. I was concerned at many stages of the project that the work we agreed to divide would not get done, and that I had to force some of my group members to engage so we could decide on what and when the parts of the project were getting done.
Opportunity:
I think the biggest takeaway I have from this group project was the importance of playing to everyone’s strengths and dividing the work so the project can be done more efficiently. In the future I hope I can apply this better to group situations as I felt like a lot of time in this project our group would just sit there spinning its wheels, while 2 members worked on something and the rest just sat there unmotivated to engage and communicate. In a future focused charette, a better plan of action I think would be crucial. Being able to plan out what needs to be done and when, and setting deadlines for critiquing and moving on from parts of the project would have allowed us to not get bogged down in one area so that every part of our project could have hopefully been stronger. In the future when starting a new design experience or way of working, I believe giving everyone in the groups roles, or discussing which roles would suit each person could help the group dynamic work more efficiently. In this group I felt as Logan and I both took on more leadership roles, and had to fight with the rest of the group to try to get things done with no one else to keep us on track, or to make sure we are meeting our goals.
Application:
I believe normally that working in groups one’s group can have the potential to produce work far greater than just one person, but in the case of this project I felt inhibited in many ways. I felt more motivated than usual to do work for the benefit of the team, but I also felt if I didn’t police other group members than they would not do their own share of the work. In many cases, being my own fault, I tend to hoard a majority of the work, but in those cases it’s mostly because I know that my group members (from past experiences) do not live up to the work expectations required by the project. I felt that the only increase in productivity of this group was that more work was produced, though I do not believe it is as high quality as it should have been. I think the foundation of our ideas were good, and the video, presentation, website, and signage were also of higher quality, but there were definitely areas within those and the AR that were not of finished-project quality. As my own contribution to the group, I worked on the logo (with Logan), website, presentation, branding (with Logan + Allison), and then aided in furthering the poster and small parts of the video and AR. I feel Logan did a great job with the video and helping develop the Logo and Branding, but our other group members spent too much time passing off the poster between each other that it did not meet final level qualities. I also believe that the AR portion of the project could have been a lot more fleshed out and solidified so it made more sense in the context of the trail. I think overall our group synergy needed improvement, I probably could have done more to help make sure everyone was engaged and that every part was high quality, but at a certain point it gets difficult to police everybody.
Presentation:
The following link shows our design process, deliverables, and reflection:
Future Recommendations:
I think the biggest suggestion for future collaborations, would be to set roles and predetermined deadlines while making sure every member of the group engages equally.
– Conor Lenhardt
GD301_Branding, Interaction, Service Design 