GDE 730

WEEK 6

Interdisciplinary Insights, New Approaches and Creative Partnerships  

This week saw a focus on the method of creative parnerships and really taking a deepdive into how designers can partner with people that are experts in different opposing fields from your own to really think about design problems in new ways and having these collaborations inform and develop ideas and projects that you are working on and learning along the way.

The main question driving the week was:

 What are the advantages of interdisciplinary provocation and how could you utilise this approach in your practice? 

Lecture – Podcast with Louize Harries

GDE730_Week6Lecture_Header

I would look at what’s available to you and what you know. Generally,
I tend to find that it’s amazing who you know within your own networks that you don’t even think about. Also, to take small steps. I think sometimes I can definitely, I tend to think about bigger pictures then get very, very lost in ginormous ideas and I forget to break it down. So, I think making lists is amazing, making maps is amazing and then just breaking things down and thinking well, what’s my first step?

Louize Harries

The lecture with Louize and Susannah was pretty long, and covered a wide rich range of projects. The main takeaway for me from this lecture was how designers can collaborate or draw upon other experts within or outside their networks often in opposing fields to advance and explore creative projects. Louize spoke about how she joined hackathons, and online communities and how she called up people like PhD students in colleges to have conversations and even get people who were specialists in narrow subject areas that informed her projects to want to help her make her projects come alive. 

Another interesting notion was how such partnerships that resulted increased her friendships and network along the way and also gave other experts a new way of looking at their own work which they may not have had before. This was important to me because generally speaking as a designer you feel you can't really communicate with people who are in opposing fields because I feel they won't understand what I am doing. I think the interesting thing that kept coming up was how even she felt that the different experts she spoke to all felt she was a bit 'bonkers' but that that asessment didn't make her uncomfortable and she embraced it and that it ended up enriching not only the relationships but expanded the scope and richness of her projects as well as what she achieved could not possibly have been done by her working alone on them.

Workshop Challenge

CHALLENGE: Map a resourcing model for budget and staff allocation to deliver a project or creative initiative of your choice. As the last week of this project brief requires you to write a more substantive strategic plan, please ensure you choose a topic or client that is most suited to your own practice interests.

This week I had a collaborative brainstorm hour long conversation with Anthony Gordon, an ontological coach and lawyer on the topic of "Improving Mental Health in Young Adults".

We spoke about the Observer-Actions-Results and the Body-Emotion-Language framework in Ontological coaching and how it works. We looked at how Anthony uses this approach to coach inner city youth who are struggling.

Then we shifted to imagining a possible solution where his framework could be transformed into an app, since youth are on their phones all the time, and what that could possibly look like.

It was an interesting hour long conversation, for the purposes of the 10-minute podcast for the challenge a lot of it had to be cut out and so only important points are retained. I've never done a podcast before so it was interesting trying out something I haven't tried previously. 

Here is the podcast:

Final thoughts and reflection

The lecture this week was really long. Sometimes it is hard to retain focus when the speakers speak organically and tangents occur. I still found it very informative. I'm struggling to see how the weekly challenges and final assignments are linked. I feel like this module is requiring a lot of time as the challenges take a lot of production and research time which is not a part of the final graded submissions. 

The workload is way too much for a part-time course. I wish the challenges were either graded or a bit more relevant to the final assignments as they are a bit hotch-potch and if they were simple small tasks would not be an issue. I am worrying and struggling finding the time to fit everything in, and not really fidning time to work on the actual assignments.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. 

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Week 5: The Collaborative Mix
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Week 7: Approaches for Working Today

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