Course Critique

The main skill I learned throughout this course is how to work with a team on brainstorming and creating something using a process. Throughout my undergraduate degree in advertising, I worked with many teams on many group projects. It seemed like the parts of the group projects where we had to come up with ideas was always the difficult part due to a lack of process or guidance. We always just got together as a team and threw out random ideas with no direction until an idea was given that everyone in the team liked and could agree upon. With this project, I really learned how to integrate an actual process into the work being done. For example, knowing when we were “diverging and converging” as a team really helped with the idea creation. This process provided us with organization when typically brainstorming never has any form of organization. We knew exactly when it was time to come up with crazy, out of the box ideas and we also knew when it was time to hone in and focus on practicality. This really helped us to come up with our best idea in a timely fashion and with less obstacles than most group projects typically have. It also helped us to capitalize on the strengths of each person on our team. With some team members being more creative and hopeful and with being more Type A and realistic, it can be hard to come together and create great work but our process helped us to rely on each other.

This class also really helped me to work on my creativity skills. I have never thought of myself as being a creative person at all and I have never been interested on practicing that skill but this course forced me to push myself and practice creativity. I have always been the person to discourage wild ideas or crazy brainstorming and tend to think more logistically about the final product throughout the project. I always think about the more realistic and practical parts of an idea like budgets and actually bringing ideas into fruition. The process we used allowed me to actually not be that type of person every once in a while and made me more open to crazy suggestions which I actually found to be pretty fun. I liked having the time to come up with fun ideas where there were no limits and no dumb ideas. I know I could save my practical brain for another time in the project and focus on expanding on my imagination. For example, during one of our diverging stages of our process we were generating ideas for our product. We came up with some wild ideas, took the ideas and ran with them, and overall laughed a lot. I like the idea of adding some fun to serious projects. I am happy I was forced to practice my creativity skill and I feel more prepared to bring creativity to the table in future group projects.

I didn’t really feel like any one part of our process wasn’t useful but if I could change anything it would be the scope of the project. I felt like the initial assignment we were given was not as broadly defined as I would have liked it to be and this feeling actually really surprised me. Typically, I prefer projects and assignments where the instructions are very detailed, I know exactly where to start, and where I have an idea what the end result is supposed to look like. In this project, I found the detailed instructions to be a constraint on our research and idea generation. I would have preferred a less defined target audience and a much broader scope. I feel like this would have given us more of a learning opportunity within the project although I do realize there was a major time constraint and the defined target audience allowed us to start further into the design process. It definitely would have been fun to come up with this part of the project on our own though. Although I was not as happy with the initial constraints on our project, I felt like every step of the process was very useful to our end result. Every step led to new insights and allowed us to go even further with our project. For example, creating the prototype didn’t seem that useful to me before we did it. After we created our prototype, I realized that the act of doing that allowed us to come up with even more ideas for it and go deeper into creating value for customers with our project. We found new and important elements to add to our prototype which resulted in a much better product.

I definitely found this project to be frustrating at times. Sometimes, I would be frustrated with my group members because I felt like we were not finishing steps in the process quick enough and was afraid we would not be able to meet deadlines at the pace we were going. I actually learned to appreciate this because I realized that taking more time to come up with ideas and brainstorm was more beneficial to our project than rushing things. Of course more time in general would have been beneficial but in the end, we met all of our deadlines. I enjoyed being able to share our ideas with the instructor and other students in our class because it allowed us to receive feedback and pick up on strengths and weaknesses we would not have realized otherwise. For example, when deciding which idea to go with our feedback from the instructor and others actually swayed us from choosing one idea to choosing our other idea that we did not initially think was that strong. If we hadn’t done this, we would have gone with the wrong idea. Overall, working on a team really added value to my learning experience and especially the particular group members I was assigned to work with. They forced me to push my limits, practice my creativity, and do things I would not have done otherwise. They were also very flexible and open-minded which allowed me to be a better version of myself in working on a team. Throughout the project, there were emotions of stress, frustration, happiness, and playfulness but in the end, I am grateful for all of these emotions because I learned the most and actually got to work on my value as a team member.