On group dynamics and priorities

Last week we had a charrette while Ken was out of town with the eventual goal of presenting our "final" design on Monday when he returned. As a group, we came up with a game plan and assigned tasks, then went to work. Yesterday, we pinned up our resulting presentation, and all I can think about is how inefficiently we worked.

Let me be clear: I am very proud of and confident in the design we presented. But the presentation itself could definitely have been a lot stronger. As a result, I've been reflecting back on the past eight or nine days and trying to identify where our weaknesses were.

First and foremost, I think we didn't prioritize enough. I had a huge project for another class due last week that took up a good chunk of my Tuesday and almost all of my Wednesday and Thursday. Because of that, studio slipped to the back of my mind--I didn't even check in or communicate with the group. (More on that later.) I can't speak for other members of the group, but I have a feeling that there were similar things going on in their lives that took away their attention.

Communication among group members was another issue that we had. I blame a lot of this on geography. I left class early one day to go to an interview, which took me away from studio during our scheduled time to meet. Other group members preferred or had to work outside of studio, which made communicating with them a bit more difficult. We didn't really show each other our work as we went along, which we should have done; we only showed each other the finished products, which often meant it was too late in the game to make changes.

During the last internship I completed, we had a meeting first thing every morning to go over my boss's agenda and address any issues or questions we had come across in our work the previous day. This helped keep us all accountable and kept the lines of communication flowing freely, as well as put out fires before they even began. Obviously, a daily meeting won't work for our studio group due to our different schedules and obligations, but the same idea of checking in regularly and clarifying what we're doing would really help us for the past few weeks. Although we are successful as a group in terms of getting along well and complementing each other's strengths and weaknesses, I feel that in the past week we were so focused on working independently that we were out of sync.

One final minor problem we had was procrastination. We didn't put our boards together until about an hour before the presentation, and as a result we had some old diagrams that slipped through the cracks and some new ones that didn't get as much space as they needed. Next time, I think it would be beneficial for us to get in a "pencils down" mentality the night before the presentation. I did this last semester with my studio partner and it really took a lot of the stress off the presentation day.