With a little help from my friends
On the second week of the Proposal Development unit, Dr Silvia Grimaldi and Dr Keir Williams delivered a workshop in which my colleagues helped me consider my design practice, and my future career plan, within the realm of my own individuality. The workshop activity was simple: each person was to fill in a set of prompted cards with reflections about themselves, resources we have and barriers we face. These cards were then attached to the walls so we could anonymously leave comments in each other’s cards [1]. It was very inspiring to see that even though all 42 of us share a similar interest in Service Design we all have different strengths, weakness, different desires, and obstacles to overcome.
It is important to say that this activity wasn’t a stand-alone exercise, on the contrary, the success of it might have been amplified by the collaborative spirit that has been cultivated amongst our cohort since the first day of class, six months ago. This spirit was both created by gestures of openness and support that many of us present towards each other daily, as well as by tools and group dynamics introduced to us during our units.
An example to this was the Manual of Me [2] (MoM), a tool introduced to us during the Ways of Working [3] (WoW) unit that encourages individuals to speak openly about their dispositions and needs to get the work done. The MoM provided structure for us to individually reflect and organise our thoughts around our personalities, preferred ways of working, skills, and shortfalls; and, by having to share these personal reflexions with the class on week 1 of the course, it transformed our mindset as we tried to let go of the believe that “being honest with one another is scary” (Fessler, 2017) to seeing the ability to expose our vulnerabilities as a mechanism to create trust (Brown, 2012).
So instead of us trying to fight off our singularities on behalf of a homogenous team, the WoW unit taught us that the opposite would be more beneficial if we were to develop an awareness of how our singularities could contribute to the team. I found that becoming more confident about myself made easier for me to think and do things differently than others without feeling threatened or defensive. This seems to be of great importance as “no team is the same, and we cannot work with everyone in the same way” (Fessler, 2017) but we can still be ourselves and use our singularities to better support the team and the work being done.
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The problem though is that developing self-awareness is not always easy. The ‘Johari’ window model gives us an idea on why we might struggle, and how the interaction with other people, providing and receiving feedback about our ways of being / working are beneficial for raising self-awareness: (Osmanoğlu, 2019)
The exercise that Grimaldi and Williams proposed to us were very much in-line with the ‘Johari’ window model and allowed me to perceive that some characteristics about myself that I took for granted (i.g. creating psychological safety within teams, my energy for going deep into theory, or my interest in healing spaces) should be valued when I consider my Major Project and future career plans. The exercise was also another opportunity for the class to show support to each other and for us to remember that, although we’ll be developing individual work during this final stage of our Masters, we are still a solid group that can feed and learn from each other.
References
Brown, R. (2012) Daring greatly. London: Penguin Random House.
Fessler, L. (2017) Completing this 30-minute exercise makes teams less anxious and more productive [online]. Available on https://qz.com/1046131/writing-a-user-manual-at-work-makes-teams-less-anxious-and-more-productive (Accessed: 24 November 2022).
Osmanoğlu, D.E. (2019). Expansion of the Open Area (Johari Window) and Group Work Directed to Enhancing the Level of Subjective Well-being. Journal of Education and Training Studies, [online] 7(5). doi:https://doi.org/10.11114/jets.v7i5.4128.
‘Johari’ window Image Source
Communication Models, G.C. (2014) The johari window model, Communication Theory [online]. Available on https://www.communicationtheory.org/the-johari-window-model/ (Accessed: 23 May 2023).
[1] The categories were: 1. Skills and Knowledge (what are you good at, what do you want to develop more, what do you have / enjoy and what do you want / find difficult); 2. Passions (what are you interested in? What have you always wanted to work on?); 3. Future Plans (what opportunities to see? What do you need to get there?); 4. Networks (What are the connections you already have that can help you with your future plans? What barriers you have to access or grow this network?); 5. Peers (Who do you work well with? Who complements your skills? Who is good at giving you feedback?)
[2] The Manual of Me is a guide to help people communicate their working preferences, their disposition and needs. On the first week of Ways of Working unit each student created a manual to respond to the following prompts: “The team I can work best from includes…”, “The environments in which I thrive have…”, “You’ll convince me to get on board by…”, “The best way to give me feedback is…”, “The basics you should know about me are…”, “Beyond work, I’m really passionate about…”, “My best working patterns look like…”, “The things I struggle with are…”, “Cool, fun, crazy, odd, strange and embarrassing thing to know about me…”.
[3] Ways of Working (WoW) is an eight week unit where newly ingressed MA Service Design students are put in groups of 4–5 people to work together on a design brief. On this ocasion the brief was to develop a service design idea to stop waste.
