How can we achieve excellence in design collaborations? Cultivating social trust, organizing logistical aspects, supporting information flow are essential to any community effort. The need for ownership makes artistic collaborations different from others. The pitfalls of ego competition can be avoided by appropriate team size, task organization and fallback options. To negotiate design priorities, team members must use critical thinking. This presentation illustrates techniques for team-building with examples from my University of Oregon design studios focused on intentional communities. While the examples come from architectural design, the lessons are applicable to many types of collaboration that involve shared information about complex problems.
59. Positive Aspects of Group Studios 8 of 13 course evaluations said collaboration was a valuable challenge (16 in Fall ’07 class)
60. Challenges of Group Studios & Coping Tactics 6 of 13 students said production expectations were too high but 4 balanced that with comments like “ I worked hard but I feel I accomplished a lot!”
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Notes de l'éditeur
Projects for real people: Client needs are a springboard for the imagination, constraints of site and program act as a guide. Here, student Brendan Soens introduces housing designs at a Portland Village Building Convergence workshop
In fact, design is typically not an individual task and we should not teach it that way. Reviews of studio teaching in recent years have emphasized the need to teach in collaborative contexts. Practice is collaborative, so should our learning be. We need to remember too that simply putting people in teams is not collaboration. Likewise, critiques of juries have pointed out that we overwhelm the process by the emphasis on the products. At the end of a studio project, the student remembers only the battering they received in the review of the product, not the journey of getting there and the lessons learned. We need to introduce deliberation and build it in to our teaching This mode of design teaching is then a collaborative learning experience one that brings students to understand how to explore and learn together in design without the ego dominating. It also allows us to adapt to the bandwidth and accommodate any transmission capacity.