Diversity is the name of the game.
Posted on October 24, 2015By Noa Bartfeld
“If during the romantic era a halo was created around the individual artist’s work in his studio, today we are returning once again to team work: the artist is actually an art director who triggers people in order to fulfill his artistic vision”. Eli Gur Arie.
My experience in the Transdisiplinari Design program, so far, has led me to to think about the broad issue of teamwork and group dynamic. My very first interaction in the TransD program did not happen in the first day of the intensive week, but actually two weeks before school started. I had been in New York for a week when I was invited via Facebook to a roof top dinner by one of the second year candidates in the TransD program. With excitement and a tremor in my heart I made my way from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn without knowing that my very first group assignment was just around the corner.
One of our earlier readings for TransD seminar, an article by Jonah Lehrer’s , “Groupthink”, about the myth of brainstorming, examines group dynamics in successful collaboration and the creativity among groups coaction. First we were introduced with the book, “Your Creative Power”, by Alex Osborn, how to use your imagination to brighten life, to get ahead (1984). In his book Osborn describes the power of free criticism brainstorming theory. I believe that one of the main motivation people have in life to action is the need we have as human beings to look good in the eyes of our surrounding. When we act with no fear of being judged by others we can be authentic to ourselves and that can lead to a great power, something that we are being reminded of over and over again on our “play” time with Roger Manix on the TD studio. And by play I mean improvisation as learning, “Productive Play: Strategies to Ignite Effective Communication and Bold Problem Solving”, Roger Manix.
Later in the article we are given the example of Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern and a Broadway fan study, searching the “ideal” team among four hundred and seventy-four Broadway productions. Uzzi research explored the successful collaboration between a well familiarized group as opposed to a group of strangers. His conclusion for the ideal dynamic is a team of well familiar people and new players. Lehre quotes: “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that artist could interact efficiently- they had a familiar structure to fall back on- but they also managed to incorporates some new ideas.”
In my previous work as a set designer I have worked in different forms. In some of the projects I had worked on by myself, others I had done with other groups of designers and in some cases I had worked with a group of people with different roles as a team. One of the biggest components of the Transdisciplinary Design is the “mined collaboration”. The diversity we have among people in our program is something I hadn’t anticipated and it had an amazing impact on our work and I am looking forward to continuing exploring the possible impact of the Transdisciplinary design and groups dynamics in collaborations.
by Noa Bartfeld