Why collaborate?

Assignment 1 Why Collaborate?

Brief 1_Week 4

Module name: Interdisciplinary Design Module code: BAID3Y3 Student name: Tumelo R. Malatji Student number: 201400419 UJ Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Department of Architecture Lecturer: Alex Opper Date submitted: 4 April 2014

Why Collaborate?

Diagram illustrating the concept of collaboration between different professions, and how the process flows from one’s skills and expertise to the other. It is not always a linear progression from the one to the other, but could circulate among two similar professions a couple of times before it flows to the next.

INTRODUCTION It is very true that architects and architecture students can sometimes be selfobsessive and self-conscious, but in the process of the Green Week project, I realized something I’d thought about once in my first year of architecture studies to be true: Architects often see themselves as Jacks of all trades, and very often they are masters of none of those trades, if not only a few.

And the reason why so often we do not get to master the rest of those trades is because of our fear of collaboration. In fact, we’re not the only practitioners who suffer from this, as you will get to see in this review. This will not only be a critical review on the Green Week collaborative project, but also a critical assessment of myself in collaborative instances.

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Montage by author, showing the collaborative efforts on site. It was a learning curve for all of us in the group to be working in the actual site with the client and getting to understand their needs first hand - testing out our protot-type to see if it works and is sustainable.

DIGESTING IT When this Green Week project began, I knew from the onset that doing a collaborative piece would not be easy, especially amongst designers – since most key players were FADA students. I was quite sceptical about the whole process. It made question what it was that I would be bringing to the table that would be valuable to the whole process. And it was only until the first day of diving into the project that I realized my first weakness. The whole time as an architecture student, it had always seemed that I, as the architect, came into any project with all the knowledge and understanding of what any client could need – all this from reading a ‘brief’ formulated either by the client or the client’s representative. And from those few paragraphs within the brief, I would then single-handedly pick from my vast depository of architectural knowledge and come up with a design that I believed and was convinced would be what the client needed. Although we are taught to do any and everything client-mindedly, so often we want to show off what we know and rather impose our suggestions onto the client.

On the day we met with our client, the only people available from our group were an industrial designer, an architect, a graphic designer and a fashion producer. All of us sat there bombarding our farmer client with questions specific to our sphere of expertise. It seemed all of us didn’t really know what questions to ask or how to 2

structure those questions in a manner that would benefit the client. Of course there were occasionally some questions about what our client’s cooperative was about, but we were all just fishing to find something we could do and do best as individuals.

The idea of co-production was far from all our minds; our client would end up having four well-designed objects that were not designed to really work together, but would not get the help he came in thinking he would gain from us. We had a problem navigating our way around how best to help our client because as time went on we realized we were all doing separate pieces that worked towards opposed ends instead of working towards one defined end. Our conflict was mainly about whose idea would be picked and whose wouldn’t be picked. We were competing against each other instead of working together, and we all wanted our own solution to be picked thus the beginning of our conflict with one another. It was mentioned to us before, in the introductory lectures about teamwork, that there would be differences amongst us as a group. But those differences would later help us in reaching an agreed conclusion. We all learnt to compromise, and realized that in order that we come up with something good, we’d have to work together and not against each other.

Towards the end of the project we all realized the skills each one had, and how each could use his/her skills conjunctively with others in the group. We also realized how important active participation is in growing us as individuals because there is always so much more that one could learn from giving one’s all – even though it may be or seem unrelated to the project at hand, it can always enable others to be more wellrounded and critical in their field of expertise. Whatever we learnt within the group can always be helpful information for us to remember in future projects.

IN CONCLUSION This project has made me see the importance of collaborative projects as a tool for learning. So often when we’re by ourselves we become too comfortable with what we do that we fail to be challenged any further, but by collaboration and coproduction one gets to see things through many eyes and learn new things that will help to

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broaden one’s knowledge and skills. As a group I could say we have learnt that alone we can be good, but working together we could become even better. And although we only saw this nearing the end of the project, it can be a lesson we take with is even into our careers, so we become open-ended designers and problemsolvers.

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