Working in a multidisciplinary team
This personal reflection on the overall project journey outlines the learnings, un-learnings and takeaways throughout my engagement with the project. I shall be using the creative process adopted in this project journey as scaffolding upon which I base my key learnings, takeaways and perhaps musings too.
Context setting of the project | Understanding the ‘what’
As a service designer with a background in communication design, I truly believe in understanding the problem we are presented to have a firmly rooted solution. As I type this, I am conscious of the verbiage I ascribe to, typically seen in the lexicons of designers including ‘problem’ and ‘design solution’. This perhaps stems from my constant “designerly way of thinking” and is also reflected on how I contributed to this project. As a designer and an empath I am equipped to be comfortable in the problem space, even if its messy, unclear and ambiguous. This was no different for the Across RCA project.
One of the greatest strengths of our group was the ability to find consensus among our pool of generated ideas in a very amicable manner. It could be because of two things, pure luck to be amongst an empathic and understanding group or strategising decision making in a way that reflects and aligns to everyones interests. I find myself leaning more towards believing the latter. As seen in Fig 1., for deciding on the theme that we would be working on for the remainder of the project, we mapped out the themes that we were interested in and formed connections within them to identify common links and interests.
My biggest learning from this part of the project is that, although not always possible, reaching common ground, hearing everyone’s voices and thoughts and identifying instances for merging complimentary ideas greatly helps in functioning as a ‘unit’ and in a way, reduces friction.
Relationship between the problem and people | Understanding the ‘who and why them’
Three primary factors influenced our group’s decision to treat loneliness as a focal point of our project. First and most important one, it seemed like a relatable social issue that all of us resonated with and felt drawn to address. This was a significant deciding factor to share a common vision and purpose to align to throughout the course of the project. Second, being in the loneliest city in the world, London, we found that a huge number of people go through loneliness stemming from transience. This brings us to the third factor, having direct access to the right people we would have to research with, in this case international students.
It became imperative to have access to the people we are creating solutions for in order to make the research grounded to draw powerful, actual and relatable insights. Here my biggest learning was that of the importance of access to the right people in order to conduct research. To be able to understand the crux of the issue better, we decided as a group to focus on international students at the RCA who fit the description of our focus group with precision. Having moved countries or even continents, we wanted to understand the challenges they face that come along with this exciting yet daunting journey.
Making sense and drawing insights | Understanding the ‘why’
Although there are countless organisations and initiatives that exist to battle loneliness especially in London, our common consensus is that there is a severe lack of awareness and reach of these initiatives to its intended target audience. We understood over here that we did not have to conjure yet another “innovate”, “engaging” and “immersive” initiative. Instead we found that the real problem lied in the fact that these initiatives don’t effectively reach its the people who could really benefit from them.
This insight in itself presented as a potential area of intervention to us. Establishing a common purpose for our group and re-visiting it each time we found ourselves a little lost helped us stay anchored to the research objectives. While empathy is a great tool when it comes to a project like this, especially since it helps us as ‘practitioners’ to put ourselves in the shoes of the target audience, it was a challenge to separate myself from the focus group space. I fit the description perfectly.
As an international student who has moved countries to pursue higher studies, navigating a new complex environment and city came I resonated with the challenges that came along. But as much as my insight and experience would make the project more personal and weighted in terms of relatability, it was a challenge to distance myself from the project time to time in order to avoid ‘deciding’ what would be best for the people we are researching about. This is a constant challenge that designers are often presented with, and the learning here is to understand the needs of the focus group instead of deciding what’s best for them.
In certain scenarios, our own personal experiences could add value and insight into the research process. It could inform a lot of ‘strongly held assumptions’ but it becomes important to realise where the process could be informed by our own experiences and where we must purely rely on observations and inferences collected from the focus groups.
Intangible ideas to tangible iterations | Understanding the ‘how’
In our group of five, we found ourselves amongst a myriad group of creatives. We were a group with the strengths (and weaknesses) of architecture, design products, painting and service design students. This was surely a diverse inter-disciplinary team. I would initially expect the team to delegate tasks according to each person’s backgrounds and churn out an outcome for the project. But the way the team organically found some semblance of a synergy and worked together surprised me for the better part. Collaboration now didn’t mean sticking to our own pathways and general best practices of the fields that we come from.
It started becoming clear to me that working in an interdisciplinary team meant more than bringing different skills to the table. It meant bringing our ways of thinking and working personalities, and re-invent them in some capacity whilst working together. The lines and dividers of the courses we hailed from soon became blurry as we starting functioning as a cohesive unit with a shared, common vision. But working in an interdisciplinary group came with it’s own set of challenges. We hailed form different courses and this meant vastly different course schedules and timings. This was perhaps the greatest challenge our team faced, to find a common time where all of us could meet and collaborate in an efficient manner.
As a service designer with a ‘superpower’ of systems thinking, I was able to place the project within the larger context of communities and society, in order to make our proposition as unobtrusive as possible. This meant thinking about ways of implementing the idea with lesser friction, thinking about the sustenance of the project, the larger impact it would have in the long run and the values generated in the process of engaging with the outcome.
This made me realise that the success of a project need not be measured purely based on incremental engagement. Depending on the true purpose of the project, with ours being fostering togetherness to tackle loneliness, the metrics of impact could mean ‘disengagement’ with the project. Wherein, participants find friendships to pursue with the directory as a medium and no longer feel the need to find further companionship or that ‘sense of belonging’ I defined earlier.
In a nutshell, I summarise my key learnings to further my design practice into the following:
1. Develop the ability to zoom in and zoom out of a problem space to identify relationships
2. Inform your practice from your personal lived experiences, but from a distance
3. Complex social issues don’t always require complex solutions
4. Innovation does not mean creating something new. It could simply mean the creative use and manifestation of existing systems to bridge gaps
5. Find the potential to fuse complimentary ideas within a group setting, document every idea in an ‘idea bank’ of sorts.
6. Learn to un-learn. Then re-learn. (Avoid preconceptions)
7. Do not fall in love with your ideas, be strong enough to let them go
8. Develop awareness around ambition, practicality and constraints
9. While working with heavy topics, learn to distance yourself from the project time to time
10. Teams often thrive and work fantastically well when under pressure
