The 'How to' project was a group project in which each group was given a question to answer with an appropriate solution. I was in group 3 which had 6 people. Our question was "How can I feel at home in a new city?"
The idea processes and development are shown in the Design Practice blog
My main role in the group was as an illustrator for the final solution and idea development. I mainly experimented with drawings and researched a few different styles to find what would work best in the resolution. It was also my job to collaborate with the other illustrators in the group and with the other roles to create a solution that covered everything we wanted it to. There were 3 illustrators in the group overall, and we worked individually and together to come up with the final drawings for the poster used in our advertising campaign. As well as the illustrator role, I was also responsible for helping the whole group in idea generation and development.
I think that I performed well in my role within the group and helped make an impact in the resolution. I created some of the basic drawings and helped develop the illustrations from templates to the final images.
As a whole, Our group worked very well together. We got on well together in a friendly environment working with high productivity. I think that everyone in the group pulled their weight and did a lot to develop our project. We all worked very hard and everyone was considerate to everyone else as well as being critical when necessary.
I have rarely worked in a group project like this before, but it did have a lot of positives. That most prominent aspect of the group work was the level of idea generation that everyone could come up with. I'm certain that no individual of our group could have come up with the ideas of developed them as well as we did working together. The outside perspective on one of your ideas is a great way of realising which parts work and which parts need to be looked at again. Another obvious advantage to working in the group was that everyone had such different skills at hand, making it much easier to collaborate together and make a resolution that covered everything it needed to to meet the brief.
There were also some negatives to working in the group environment. One difficulty was trying to agree on one idea or one direction to develop the project in. With so many different ideas being generated, each individual is confident that their own idea is usually the best way to go and it is sometimes difficult to accept that it isnt appropriate for this group project. A similar difficulty is that if you do think your idea is appropriate, it is often difficult to communicate what is in your head to the rest of the group and so the idea doesn't come across as a strong one and could not be considered. The last biggest negative to working in the group is that it is very difficult to make your own style come across in the finished product. With 6 different styles and different ways of designing focussed on one project it is very easy for individual style to become lost in the resolution.
In the next project i think it would be better to develop the ideas slightly more and increase the amount of research before going straight into making the resolution. I still think we did enough research for what we produced, and the main reason for lack of reasearch was to do with the time constraints of the short project. I would have also liked to make a bit more input to the final design, for example, showing my individual style through everyone elses.
The resolution could have been improved with a more detailed advertising campaign for the product. This could have been produced with another poster design or two. It could also have been made better if we had produced a website or at least a rough homepage, as a website was mentioned throughout our ideas and development. Again, the reason that these improvements were unrealistic was a result of time constraints. I would have also liked to improve the project by making it more ethnically inclusive. We know for a fact that there are a high percentage of invernational students from overseas and our project didnt really embrace them as an audience. It would have been useful to include this because it couldn't really be more relevant than to someone who has had to move thousands of miles away from home instead of just a few hundred. I think it would have been really interesting to research other cultures traditional architecture and traditional home decoration to use in a poster like one of ours.
We decided in the group that our presentation would be performed by just two members of the group, as it could have seemed messy if the whole group took it in turns to mention different parts of our production. The presentation could have been improved with some use of powerpoint or something more visually communicating of our process of design.
I think overall that we perfomed well in the group, worked hard and that it was evident in the final resolution.
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