Second Year - Group Project

As a designer it's important to be able to work as part of a group, therefore, at University, we often do group projects to build team work. We recently began a group project for my second year but this project has been slightly different and I wanted to discuss me experience with online group work and how it differs to normal group projects.

This project is for a live brief and so I can't discuss the details of the actual project but I do just want to give an insight into my personal experience with group project during Covid-19 so far.

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised with my group's willingness to work together and actually do the work. I'm sure we've all been in a situation where someone doesn't pull their weight and the rest of the group have to play catch up. However, the group I am in for this project is actually a strong group where everyone is wanting to work together and is doing their bit to ensure that the work runs as smoothly as possible.

Within the group, there are 5 of us and we each are of a similar level, meaning we work in a similar way and style. This helps massively when collecting research and sketch pages as we all knew what each other way doing. Having a similar standard of work also means that we are able to show continuity throughout the project and nothing looks out of place.

One of the biggest changes for this project was the online aspect. For each of our meetings, we have had to schedule time to do a teams call and everyone discuss ideas and where we want to take this project. As a group who all want to work, this has meant that we are having at least 2 calls a week for about an hour, but typically we have been doing 3 calls, following feedback calls with the client. Although a lot is discussed in these calls, the interaction levels are lower than those of face-to-face meetings. Connection problems, working from home with others around and just not being able to see the work in front of us has made this process harder than in previous group projects. However, online meetings have also gave us the opportunity to explore new apps and soft wares that can be used to help our work. We have started using an app called Miro where we each share our sketch work pages and everyone can leave comments and discuss opinions in real time. This has helped bring back the sense of teamwork that was otherwise lacking with online calls.

I personally am finding it slightly harder to design innovatively without having others around to bounce ideas off of. In studio spaces, we would typically work together and discuss ideas, maybe have 2 or 3 people sketch out the ideas that are discussed and then everyone discuss improvements and new avenues to explore. However, with online calls, a lot of the work is done independently and then we present them to the group. This then means that although feedback and ideas are bounced around, the time together is a lot more limited and our interactions are hindered slightly. In some ways, this project feels like a personal, individual project but with meetings to discuss feedback every week rather than a collaborative piece as we can't collaborate physically.

I know my university are discussing having studios open again to hire out in January which will hopefully help boost team work and interactive levels, however for now, I do believe that this is extremely new territory and although online isn't as interactive as physical studio sessions, they are still beneficial in their own right and make the project much more of a challenge than perhaps previously!

Let's hope January brings good news and studios can begin to open again!