Arch1392 Reflections

With another semester now over I have had a think about ARCH 1392, what I have learnt, and my impressions of the subject.

Working in a team has both its benefits and downfalls with which we experienced both and the progressive nature of the course meant there was always something happening and to prepare for, even if it was small like a blog entry, or larger like the presentations and finally building to the final model in UT3.

I found the blogs to be a reasonable size for a weekly task and the presentations every 3 weeks were also achievable.

But as we had no experience in UT3, I thought perhaps there could have been some demonstration of the basics and common tasks we would all use that could have saved us lots of time later and allowed us to focus on producing better models with more features rather than trying to perfect things such as creating and applying textures and meshes from 3ds max, which ultimately was easy but the learning curve to get there was high for different tasks.

The first few weeks of the course where the lectures were not sorted and the course was still finding its feet, would have been an ideal time to get us all up and running with the essentials, which I understand wont be a problem in the future as UT3 is covered in first year in the new degree, but thought it might be worth a thought for the next time a new course/subject is undertaken.

Working in a team was great for us when producing our presentations, with fun ideas to present from different people appearing in what I thought were the more entertaining presentations of the course. We seemed to have a good balance for presenting and they were enjoyable to produce.

However due to the personal situations of members of our group, the bad side of team work was also experienced in the fabrication part of our project, with only 2 of us left to build the UT3 model at the end of the course. Perhaps this added to my feeling that we needed some teaching in it as we had less manpower than other groups, but leaving uni deep into the a.m. to achieve our basic results whilst satisfying to finish, left me feeling we could have achieved much greater results with more hands on deck and less time wasted learning the ropes and losing hours of work through constant crashing of the program when importing certain objects.

I also found in hindsight and from interacting with members from other groups that maybe more time spent giving UT3 a go from scratch rather than rushing to the comfort of 3ds max and trying to import everything, may have lead to a more user friendly model in regards to the technical problems we encountered.

Whether or not I will ever be in an office that uses this technology I dont know but I am glad I have the knowledge to offer it for either my own clients or to a prospective employee which will hopefully gain me an edge over other job seekers in the future.

I found our time with Matt effective and also for those travelling to get to uni and working found it easier to do our meetings after class than try to come back for 30mins on a seperate day.

Ultimately, with all the troubles we had technically with UT3, I found it fitting that the final presentations were abandoned due to technical problems in UT3!!! Whilst most of us were happy to go home to bed on Wednesday, I was looking forward to experiencing everyones models and as a group checking out each others work.

All in all I enjoyed the studio type course and found it refreshing from the standard structure of subjects which breathed some life into a hectic uni schedule and I think much was learnt by all in the first running of this course.

Reflections on topic order

After some discussion, these were our thoughts on the order we think the topics would be best in:

Planning - good to set a plan from the start
Intent - Possibly could be with planning we thought.
Records - learn the value of keeping records early on
Hierarchy - Would know a bit about the hierarchy of your group and
building by this stage
Context - start to think about the context of your building in its
surroundings
Knowledge - Plenty of time to get a  heap of knowledge by this stage
Remuneration - Doesnt need to be to early in our opinion.
Conflict - could be good to reflect on any conflict from later in the
semester

Conflict

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

The above quote by William James I believe is very true in regards to maintaining a working relationship in a collaborative effort when conflict arises. I believe a lot of conflicts can be happily resolved if both parties are open to solving it rather than widening it.
To often I see people dig there heels in, when a little compromise can see instant results......I guess ego comes into it a lot of the time.

So in the situation where conflicting parties cannot resolve their differences, it is important that the hierarchy in place can do it for them.

In the case of our project, we are yet to have to deal with any real human conflict but in theory our protocol to solving a problem would be this:
* two parties try to solve it themselves, if it doesnt work then:
* Speak to team leader, leader gives decision and if one party still is not happy then:
* Go to our group tutor or course convener and discuss resolution...this is to be the final 'appeal' so to speak, and whatever decision comes from that is final.

But conflict may not necessarily just be among humans. We have experienced conflict amongst machine, with exports of our 3ds max model not being accepted by UT3. In regards to this conflict there may not always be a reasonable solution as machines cant reason and compromise, what it wants is exact or it wont go on. This may lead to us redoing work in different ways wasting valuable time and still not guaranteeing a result.

I think more human conflict would have arisen in our project if we were all confident in every aspect of what needed to be done and then it would have been up to our individual ideas and designs about how to do it. However as we saw a foreign path to complete this project, know one in particular seemed set in any particular idea that they would really fight for, i.e. we were all flexible in what and how we achieved our goal.

So whilst I am happy to not have had to deal with any human conflict, it may well have been a better learning experience for us all if there had been!

Refernces:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/whenever_you-re_in_conflict_with_someone-there_is/227935.html