Reflection

Over the period of one month, I had the pleasure of working with Steph and two other Design 400 students, Jordan and Ifrah, on a collaborative design project. I learned a lot about the reality of creating a design project from proposing an idea to choosing medium, and then to actually creating the final product. 

Initially I thought there would be a lot of frictions due to the nature of working with four various, independent creative minds. However, it turned out to be a really smooth process with a huge amount of space for each members of the group to contribute their ideas and compromise. 

Ifrah came up with the backbone of the project - a deck of self-promotional cards regarding an issue close to heart. The purpose of the cards is to create a visual addendum to our resumé for job interview or self-introduciton. Throughout the discussions and each meetings, the project slowly morph to an inspirational or statement piece, depending completely on the artists' choice of expression. 

Progressively, we came up with the idea for the box, the name for the project, and eventually the design for the box. Each person is in charge of designing six cards that deliver the messages that they want to express. I created six cards about the urban stigmatisation, pain and sadness. I create three more inspirational pieces, and the other three addressing the issue. 

My biggest takeaway from this project is the attitude of approaching problems and the unknown. Whether it is what type of paper to choose or how to edit pictures, as long as you have see it as trail-and-error, you will find the "answer". The project isn't a hard project that is too time consuming, but it did take a lot of trails and errors to really figure the double sided printing out as well as the right paper to create a quality set of cards. 

Everyone is open-minded and willing to listen to one another and to discuss. It was a remarkable experience to work with students that have more experience to guide and lead you.