Group Work in Design
Posted on December 17, 2018
Source: https://www.newlinkstraining.com/management-and-leadership/group-work-theory-and-practice/
Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Happy Holidays, or as they say in the “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” “Happy Solstice!” Although perhaps an odd place for inspiration, this special episode of the Netflix series picks up a couple days before the witching holiday with Sabrina deeply bothered by seeing her mom caught in “limbo” or the space between the worlds of life and death. Being in limbo usually signifies the soul has unfinished business and thus cannot get to a final place of rest. Sabrina, deeply bothered by this, wants to help her mother and seeks to understand the problem. She knows what she has to do—a seance—but even though she is a witch with powers and a plan, she cannot move forward. She spends the next few minutes of the show trying to recruit people to take interest in her plan and purpose until she finds a group to perform the ritual with her.
I may not be Sabrina the teenage witch, but I do not have to be to identify with the struggle she faced at the start of the episode, it, if abstracted, is one I have wrangled with many times over the past semester and throughout my time as a designer. Although Sabrina had a personal interest, purpose, and knew the tools she could use to move forward, she couldn’t. She had to find a team, but not only that, she had to make people see her intention, share her interest, and buy into the project. Although she had a plan, if she attempted the séance alone would likely not have yielded as good or useful of results as one performed with a team.
Design is not far from this catch-22 situation of dependent conditions Sabrina also experiences. She is a witch with powers but cannot successfully “witch” without the help of others, despite even the highest level of preparedness and passion. I am a designer, but my education in this field has taught me that I cannot design alone. In our fourth class of Design Led Research, Professor John Bruce told the class, “You should not ever practice these tools alone.” In studio, again to a room of designers, my professors instructed us that we could not design as a single person— “Two people are fine, four people is OK, but the ideal group is 3 people. It always works well.”
My confliction is not with bring other voices and diversity to the design table. Like in the example of Sabrina, better results are often yielded as a result of inclusion outside of self. However, in saying this and teaching it as an absolute, it seems as though we are denying the outside system or journeys that surround design—namely that 1.) individual could be inspired and well versed in the practice and 2.) that working in a group is an intuitive thing. In a program that praises emergence, it seems as though that is exactly what is lacking in this heavy-handed approach to designing.
Responses to this are varied, but in my opinion, two are necessary: DLR needs to recognize that design can and sometimes does begin with an individual and then teach both tools for approaching design alone and tools for seeking out a co-collaborator team thus opening various avenues for forward movement. Furthermore, courses such as the Milano school’s Laboratory in Group Facilitation, Intervention and Process should be mandatory Transdisciplinary Design MFA pre-requisites rather than opt-in elective courses.
-CC