Barriers to Bridges

Group 4

M22 | IR2728 : Creative Leadership

Faculty: Satyam Parikh

TA: Dhavlesh Suthar

1. New students are not aware about what all CEPT has to offer so they miss out on a lot of things which they need or might help them in either academic or non-academic ways.

2. Students don’t know about various clubs that go on in each faculty and in the campus So they think that there only exists academic stuff and keep banging their heads in it. But that is not the actual case, they can join any of the clubs of their interests wherein a lot of activities go on which can give them a break from work.

3. Design is a field where you as an individual are required to be interactive and build a great network which is not possible without interacting with others because every person will need help, guidelines and feedback from others, may it be for constructing a house or designing the most simple poster.

4. First year at CEPT is common for all i.e. students from all the faculties are provided with the same knowledge because everyone studies about their own field and they have to go through a studio selection process. Now if they don’t talk to seniors about it, they will face problems in the selection process and end up getting into the studio which they will have to suffer for the entire semester.

5. There are no separate classrooms for different studios at CEPT, there is just this huge hall kind of a structure with many different studios partitioned by tagboards. The idea behind this is to be able to interact with as many people as possible from around the studios and again gain knowledge will not come to you, you will have to search out for it.

6. Sometimes seniors don’t respond nicely to juniors or don’t come to them often on their own which gives a feeling that they are not interested and thus juniors hesitate to start a conversation or interact with them.

• The project looks into developing student connections and bonds over faculties and overcome the hesitation and reluctance to reach out and meet new people. This is the very nature of the CEPT institute where vertical studios help create a buddy like feel amongst its juniors and seniors.

• The reason for a silent diminishing to occur amongst its student body is mainly due to social anxiety, worry of conversations to go wrong and general fear of judgement. Methods to tackle this very issue is what is being focused here.

Student Survey

A survey was done among the students of multiple faculties of CEPT in order to understand the stand regarding social anxiety. The Results are follows.

EMPATHISE: USER NEEDS

CEPT has an atmosphere which urges students to perform their best which can be overwhelming. Some of the reasons that adds on to the same are:

• Long working hours

• Continues rejections of their designs

• Dealing with continues pressure leading to stress and anxiety.

Most of the times students look for

• Friendly support from peers and seniors

• Healthy discussion on their work from peers and seniors

Solutions

1. Theater way of breaking ice

• There are a lot of theater exercises that usually theater groups practice before their show to just ease them up a bit, making them relax, to break the ice between the team members and mainly to make them comfortable around each other.

• Nowadays a lot of official theater groups like ATMAN THEATRE are conducting workshops of such kind for outsider groups to help every group member to ease up and to increase the group spirit.

• If such exercises are conducted in CEPT after studio hours a few times a week, it will help everyone get comfortable with others. Since this is not at all related to work and is much more fun opening up exercises, juniors wouldn’t feel insecure to come and communicate with seniors. And with increase in such activities the students will slowly open up and even discuss work, experiences and non work stuff.

Approach

• As stated above it has been clearly laid out why communication is required between students of different batches but tackling the issue can be quite challenging.

Solutions

a. Shaking-The-Hand

Instructions:

• Everyone briskly walks randomly in a space and whenever they encounter a person they have to smile and give a gentle handshake and greet each other and continue moving.

• Walking briskly helps them loosen up after hours of sitting continuously in front of laptop screens and just a hello can break the ice between people to a very small extent but it's a start.

b. Any One Who

Instructions: c. The 10 Second Machine

• Set up a circle of chairs for everyone except one person. That person will say a statement that is true for themselves and also which might be true for a few people sitting there, for example, if he/she did night out an entire week, you can say “anyone who did night out this entire week”. If that statement is true for anyone in the group, they must get up out of their chair and quickly move to a different chair. The game continues with the person left without a chair and he or she must then say something true for them and so the game goes on.

• This is an exercise where you will know a person on a surface level for a start and later it can lead to conversations and hence breaking the ice.

Instructions:

• Maybe taking simple steps as a starter to break the ice between them like simple games, exercises where everyone can participate without any fear or insecurity of others judging them

• And here Theatre exercises comes as a solution.

• Divide the players into groups of 3 or 4. Each group has to pick a chit where they get a name of the machine, using their bodies they have to make the form of the machine in 10 seconds Each player in the group has to be part of the machine.

• This game is designed to help players work together and develop cooperation and team building