Andy (and everyone else teaching only group work), Do your students have portfolio issues? First off, it is rare in the UX community to have group portfolio reviews but in ID it is common at both regional and national conferences here in the USA at least. We hear a lot from reviewers of many of our students that too much of their higher level work is too group oriented and are presented without a clear definition of "what exactly did YOU do?"
Also, I'm not challenging the requirement of collaboration and points of group thinking, but that is different than the group project. That from what I can see happens naturally in the studio environment anyway. If you have real studio spaces for students to work in, the "foxhole experience" kicks in. Meaning they all learn from each other just by being put through the harsh realities of the short project environment. Also, I really want to be clear that I am distinguishing between people in the same exact role working together vs. the very necessary and very common requirement of biz, dev & design collaborating together. I still find it very rare in my career even on the biggest projects of my career where I really did group work with other designers in the same design role. Lastly, don't your programs have final project or thesis at the graduate level? We even have that at the undergraduate level? This is required so we know that a student is not scraping by on their peers' shoulders and can do all the roles required of a substantial project. And should this final project/thesis be the only place where this work is done? Shouldn't they have practice with issues related to self-motivated work over group/social-motivated work? In the end, I feel that there needs to be a balance struck, but am heavily leaning towards individual work over group work. To me, school is about practicing hard & soft skills, but hard skills have to be given more weight over soft skills. Soft skills are skills that happen throughout your career, while hard skills tend to be learned and mastered earlier on and supplemented through technological advancement requirements. The requirement in my mind is to make sure that every individual student can do all the tasks to the assessment level required by the program. Group work often lets students fall too quickly on depth as they can easily find partners to fill in other areas of breadth. Great thread ... more thoughts would be great. Jared in your role as design process researcher, what is your experience in the group vs. individual designer role per project? --d ave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47452 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
