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Workshop Proposal for Spring 1997:

How to win friends, influence people, and get high scores on team evaluations
a workshop for graduate design students in mastering the dynamics of teamwork


Background
Many students enter the graduate program at ID without much experience working on design and development teams. Traditional design schools tend to emphasize the development of individual style at the expense of developing the skills necessary to work successfully on project teams. Even those students who have found themselves working on group design projects may not have had the opportunity (or natural ability) to reflect on the dynamics of teamwork, and to polish their own collaborative skills.

At ID, these students are expected to work on collaborative projects, but are not given the tools necessary to understand and manage team dynamics. As a result, we often see student project teams in which group dynamics have become extremely unhealthy for all involved, clearly diminishing the creative potential of the group.

The ability to work well on collaborative design teams together with individuals from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of skills is an essential skill for designers to possess in today's marketplace. This short workshop would prepare students to develop and hone these necessary skills during their course of studies at ID.

Class Format
Sessions would take place in the first (orientation) week of the semester, before classes have started or just as classes get rolling. Sessions could be scheduled during evening hours and would include seminar-style discussions of past experiences, role playing exercises and presentations by faculty and/or expert guest speakers. (I envision this as taking a sort of conference tutorial format: presentations, facilitated discussion, group exercises.)

A half-day follow-up meeting would be scheduled for intersession to discuss the application of collaborative skills in class projects, effectively operating as a "postmortem" for all A session team projects.

Short readings may be selected by presenters and distributed to participants in advance of the workshop meetings.

Objectives
Participants will develop a common foundation of tools with which to evaluate, shape and communicate about their own collaborative skills and styles and those of their project teammates.

Some themes might include: establishing common group goals; understanding team member roles and natural collaborative styles and team formations; respecting individual skills; learning to listen; learning to participate, contribute, and retain your composure and sanity on a team project; reflecting on the dynamics of teamwork and collaborative processes (including the incorporation of informal postmortem sessions into all group project schedules).

Evaluation
This would be an ungraded "workshop" for which no credit is earned. The effectiveness of the workshop itself would be assessed through participant feedback immediately following the initial workshop and then again during the intersession meeting. The workshop's effectiveness would also be indicated by the success of student team projects and a marked decline in the rate of complaints of disastrous project teams.