Over 7 weeks, our work on this brief has been among some of the most challenging I’ve undertaken on the course. Here, I’ll aim to dissect where things went less smoothly than could have been hoped, and what could be done in future projects to handle these issues.
Making and design skills
I wanted to spend a lot of this project working on skills I had not previously developed, and so was able to work on music composition, video editing, and handcrafting using needle and thread. However, ultimately, a lot of this work was discarded in favour of work completed by members of the group with much more experience and skill in these areas. I’m glad I was able to build my experience here, as well as learn from those whose skills complemented my own, and this underlines the importance of being willing to discard your own work when the work of others is more beneficial to the group, which was something I admittedly had some difficult with.
Theory and communication
As a brief about feminism, we all came into this group with strong personal opinions on how we should go about things – opinions which were, in some cases, not vocalised until late in the project. There was also a definite difference in knowledge of theory relevant to the subject at hand. I felt as though, frequently, members of the group would have some trepidation regarding the thoughts of the male members of the team, owing to our lack of lived experiences around the topic, and so I made sure to try and support my contributions with both primary and secondary research.
Of course, no amount of theoretical knowledge can be an adequate replacement for lived experience in design, and I certainly could have made more of an effort to create space for these thoughts to be expressed earlier in the project (at the time, I did believe I was doing this, but I hadn’t adequately taken into consideration group members’ concerns around language and expression).
Conclusion
Overall, these issues should be expected when dealing with social issues in which we all have personal investment, and is an important skill to acquire considering its prominence in future work. I think some of my contributions were treated as less relevant than I believed them to be, but overall this has been an important learning experience in knowing when to take more of a step back in the ideation process, as well as dealing more sensitively with issues around lived experience.
Harry Solomons 