Although it wasn't completely intentional or our first choice, we ended up being the only group of 3 as opposed to pairs for this collaborative brief. During the session when we had to pick design partners, the majority of the year had already discussed and pretty much decided their partners, therefore leaving little choice for the remaining few. Although I do admit not really discussing about potential partners prior to the session, I actually wanted to be put into groups rather than select working partners as I wanted to test my ability to work with other designers. Similar to the working industry, It's probably very unlikely that I'll get full control of the choice of brief and people I work with/for, therefore wanted to keep this sense of reality with my collaborative practice. In hindsight, I'm definitely glad that this happened as I feel that I've learnt a lot from this in terms of both my own design attributes and working in a small team.
Out of the people who were still looking for working partners, I decided to work with Ross and Kate together as a group of 3 for several reasons, one of them being the fact that I wanted to work in a small group again, as this had not been done since 1st year. I chose Kate because she shared an interest in video but had an open way of thinking and wanted to work on a range of projects, she didn't just want to focus on one area of graphic design which I also shared; this is evident in her past projects where she's produced a selection of work that shows a wide range of design approaches and formats. In some ways, her outcomes are often quite unpredictable, which I really admired and was excited to collaborate with. I also considered Ross for this taste and interests in typography and design for print, which is similar to me. He doesn't really have a specific 'style', but similar to Kate, works on a range of briefs and has produced a nice range of work. Looking back, I think we've made the right decision to work together; because none of us worked specifically in a particular design approach, we were able to think conceptually during the early stages of our development, without being interfered by initially ideas of what we wanted to produce.
As a group of 3, we all had our own interests within graphic design that we wanted to focus on but were able to compromise to focus on identifying the initial problems of the brief. Although the beginning few days did go quite slow, with most minimal of decisions being made, we were all quite dedicated to the project and were able to make some bold decisions later on that made up for the slow start. I think with working collaboratively, you'll often become more responsible and this has definitely been the case with the collaborative brief. Although I did suggest that I wanted to work more on print and editorial, as a group we all wanted to produce something that had a strong concept first before deciding on what type of product we would design, therefore we didn't really capitalise what specific skills each person would be responsible for until the later stages. When developing practical work, we were able to delegate specific roles depending on our strengths and interests on what we wanted to do. With 3 people in the group, we were able to produce slightly more ambitious ideas and were able to follow up on it, which became beneficial.
In terms of the management of the collaborative practice, we were able to keep on top of things most of the time. Before the project, I did feel that it would be difficult to maintain a fluent collaborative practice throughout due the fact that we're in a 3 therefore making it hard to arrange meetings outside college hours for example. However the dedication from the group as a whole has really shown that working in small groups can work effectively. I was mainly responsible for timetabling and action planning throughout, which was made effective by the use of the blog and emails between us. In terms of design responsibilities directly relating the brief, I didn't really get the chance to work on what I really wanted to develop as we had more people to share responsibilities between. At certain points, I did feel that there was perhaps too little work for too many people to work on, but as a whole design practice, we've definitely benefitted in specific periods of the development.
As a result to this collaborative experience, I'd be more than happy to work collaboratively as a partnership or as a group of 3 again. Although we did seem to have wasted a lot of time making decision between us, the collaboration has really made us think and work more professionally as designers; we were making decisions that were informed and considered throughout rather than simply for producing what could have been an easy way out. When responsibilities were delegated well, we worked efficiently and produced some good results, but as a whole a collaborative practice definitely requires a lot more project management to keep things together and on target. After working with Kate and Ross, I feel a lot more confident as a designers, in terms of my methods of tackling a brief and also working with other people. It was useful to work with someone like Ross who shared an opinion on the importance of researching to be able to resolve a brief effectively. Working with Kate on the other hand kept our ideas a reality, she was often very direct with her opinions, and because she had a very different way of thinking in terms of concepts and practice, it complimented to our development throughout. In hindsight, I'd definitely consider working with Kate or Ross again in the future and I'm satisfied with the design solution we have come up with.
