I took on a few different roles within our group. I was involved with the initial ideas of the "Make Tea Not War" concept and developed this further with the group. I also produced the tags for the tea bags with the copy provided to me by another member of our team. One evening I designed the stickers which appear on the Mugs and bought the tea for our presentation. On the final day my main role was to organise the group and help with time management, as well as presenting our design to the rest of the course.
My performance was quite good for this project I think. I got annoyed when one of our team walked out, however I believe that I worked better without his negative energy. On the final day I may have been a bit too bossy towards the group, but I think we needed someone to take a role which organised the team. I could of had more of a design impact in this task if I had of spent more time developing my ideas and though more creatively towards our audience and the "How To..." issue.
Our group did not work very well together at the beginnings, however once one team member had walked out we worked so much better and became more productive. Once we had established who could do what in the team, we worked well together.
A positive of working in a group was the aspect of everyone having different strengths and weaknesses. I am not too good at illustration, but there was someone else who was. We tried to use everyones strengths to create our final design. A lot of aspects of this project, I could not have achieved if it was an individual project.
A definite negative of working in a group was the difficulty of getting on with everyone and not making some people feel neglected. I found it a task to try and be professional towards one person in the team due to their childish manner and maybe I dwelled on this too much and let it eat into the time I could have spent designing.
Next time I have a brief to complete, I aim to improve my time management and develop my ideas in my own free time, as well as that is timetabled. Also it would be good if I could gather more of my own research to help with my initial concept on how to complete a brief.
I believe our presentation could have been better. Our tea making idea took a lot of time and I don't believe out audience made the connection so I felt the need to explain. The digital presentation didn't work which was a real bummer. It would of made the presentation a bit more interesting if our audience had a visual aid alongside the verbal explanation... but we carried on without it without letting it affect us.
Overall I was quite happy with the result that the group produced and I have definitely learnt that working in a group is a difficult task, however you can achieve more than you could on your own as you can draw from others strengths.
