Within this post I will be addressing the overall experience of working in a collaborative team with advantages, challenges, decision making etc.
collaborative working in a team.
Advantages of Working Collaboratively.
There are major advantages to working in a collaborative setting that I personally have experienced. One advantage is that the criticism given is very informative and helps build a perfected design, an example of this was when I got asked to make the videos for our concept a bit “rugged” to imply that the video is not new and could cater to our nostalgia driven audience. Another example is, that problem solving is very fast, instead of being stuck on an issue on your own, multiple members of your team can help one another and resolve issues quickly, ultimately improving the quality of designs.
Challenges.
On the flip side, there were also a few challenges that approached our team, one challenge being a language barrier between myself and the marketing team as the team consisted of native French students. This posed as a challenge as having important information relayed to one another would sometimes be altered by the translator, leading to crucial elements of the message being missed out causing confusion. This challenge was overcome by speaking in person and using common vocabulary in English to one another, with the addition of using visual demonstrations to easily communicate what were looking from one another.
The other major challenge that appeared before myself and the marketing team was conflict between the direction the campaign should proceed in, many different ideas were thrown together but choosing one that both teams would enjoy doing took some time. This was easily overcome by sharing a larger volume of ideas until one stuck with both teams which was explain in previous posts.
Concept Development and Decision Making.
Collaboration shaped the iterative design process as criticism was given when designs weren’t aligned with the marketing teams views, once criticism was given the iterative design would be chiselled down to perfection where both the creative and marketing team would feel satisfactory.
I worked strongly as a team with Lewis Wainwright for the final outcome of our design process, this was because we had regular communication between ourselves online and in person. This lead to regular changes on the web design that we thought should have been done to maximise the chance of pleasing the marketing team and client.
Working With A Client In An Industry Context.
Responding to a client brief influenced our approach as there were very specific details that had to be implemented within the design, with the addition of the client setting being closely resembled to one that we may encounter in the future, leading to myself and my partner taking this task very seriously.
Feedback from the client was very regular and straightforward, there was no sugar-coating, but professional communication with informative feedback/criticism that my team could work from to successfully meet the clients needs. This heavily relates to industry practice as in a real world setting the crucial information given from the client is exactly what the client needs for his problem to be solved, and feedback/criticism will be given out numerous times until all is perfected.
Working with a client impacted the development of my ideas as I was no longer creating what I personally thought the campaign should be, I instead had to change my way of thinking and branch off into different skills that I had to develop to meet the clients needs, as I am no longer designing purely for personal expression, instead I am solving a problem for someone else. Development was slow at first with the change of scenery, but soon I overcame the hurdle and successfully tackled the clients needs head on.