Compared to typical studio projects I personally think that this project taught all of us how to integrate ideas from multiple points of view; or at least it questioned that ability and brought to light some interesting group-work lessons. We had a lot of conflicting opinions and ideas in the beginning and I feel like that was largely due to realistic nature of the project. Knowing that ONE of the options would be picked and actually presented to the community put a lot of new pressure on us as students but also was a really interesting new perspective to have on our design work. I think this new experience motivated us to comb through ALL possible ideas and solutions, which in the beginning put our class a little behind and opened up some new tensions. All those chiefs in one room and not enough indians was quite the experience.
Learning to not have to be in control over every aspect is a very essential skill to learn, especially for real life situations. Once out of school, we will all be working in teams and with other opinions and views. It’s important to know how to put the reins down every now and then and to understand that you are not your ideas. We had a lot of ideas get shut down and quite a few people take that personally. Especially in a real life situation like this, criticism is important and shouldn’t be taken personally.
This real life situation definitely motivated all of us in a new way. However I do think that there was a noticeable decrease in the amount of homework that each person had every night. Although that break was nice, I often felt kind of helpless when coming up with new ideas. Like even if I did all this work for an idea I loved, chances are someone would have hated it in class and the work would have gone un-noticed.
All in all I still have a hatred for group projects that end up like this, but I think that working as a team and finally coming up with one solid solution to the United Ways question was pretty impressive.
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