2) Reflection on the collaborative process

The experiences of being in a team have been a good experience so far. The group has been co-operating and has been progressively improving in terms of specifying and narrowing down our design thinking for our wicked problem. I feel like we could definitely engage further use of the specific design thinking tools that have been presented to us. And I personally think we have not utilized these tools to the fullest extent because initially we were a little all over the place and recently we have narrowed down the actual problem and developing a solution for it. So now that things are more specified we can actually apply those design thinking tools and yield positive results from them.

I think that our group as a whole when working and discussing things together develop the connections between readings, discussions and our process and development. Because through our discussions, we find out things that each one of us wouldn’t have if we were working individually, so each person gives some insight that furthers us as a group. So for example, when we came up with the problem statements, each of us had written three different statements, stating different points that were all valid, so once we had to finalize our problem statement, we brought together all those different points under one umbrella. Then once we did that we broke down the different stages of the problem and in our design briefs each of us has kind of focused on a different stage of the problem. Through diagrams and visually drawing out the problem we were able to understand the three different stages in which the problem occurs: Production of the raw materials/Production of the garments/Post consumer use. So therefore the individual research and development that took place in our own time was effective in developing our group’s problem statement and design proposal.

Furthermore, to evaluate my role in the group, I prefer managing the tasks that we have to get done, and setting goals that can push our group further. I still feel that we have been stuck in the preliminary stages of this project but now that things have been more specified I definitely think we should put our idea out there and see what sort of feedback and results it will get.

The difficulties and struggles that were initially faced were coordinating our group to meet, and actually coming to a definitive narrowed/focus problem. But we have been able to overcome that and we can progress further in actually trying to apply our solutions to our wicked problem and evaluate the results accordingly.

I think that the weekly journaling exercises have been quite successful, in that the reading helps me understand various tools we can apply as part of our design strategy, and for the work we will be doing from now onwards I feel that is necessary to use some of those tools and theories to help us success in this project.