Week 13 : Mid-term presentations
Another intense but interesting week has passed. The week started off with a midterm seminar. Time flies, and it is somewhat hard to understand that we are more than halfway through our projects. The seminar offered a space for us to share our results and thoughts so far and resulted in nice feedback and discussions. Further, it also offered a glimpse into the other project groups work which is, as always, very interesting but also very inspirational!
Regarding our project work, we have mainly focused this week on analysing our learnings and insights from the six interviews we have held. Our analyses resulted in a requirement list for a virtual educational space, something we believe is very valuable as part of a solution!
Lastly, this week also offered an opportunity to take part in a workshop on creative work in high-tech environments led by Anna Grzelec. In two hours, Anna took us through a journey on creative work where we, firstly, learnt about it theoretically through a lecture, and, secondly, got to try creative techniques out ourselves.
I believe the workshop itself was very interesting and that we got some good input and inspiration on how to work creative within a group. Her reflections and insights on top-down and bottom-up creative work offered some interesting insight. As well her arguments that creativity is enhanced through movement, then, why don’t add some elements of movement into, for example, meetings. Next time I am getting stuck in my creative process I will try out including movements in my process!
Even more educative was that we ourselves got the time to familiarize ourselves with and try out one such creative tool. Through a process in three steps, we got to try out finding creative solutions to a problem of our choice, firstly, through dreaming freely on what the dream would be as visualised in Fig 1, secondly, through ideating upon how to fulfil this dream and, thirdly, through ideating on what the weaknesses of our ideas are. I really appreciate this way of looking at a problem, starting from the ideal state rather than from the problems of the current state. Though, this was also the tricky part of it as it was so easy to fall back into the problems of how things are now and the barriers that they represent, something I in turn believe hindered us from being truly creative and thinking creatively on how to achieve our dreams.
Though, what I appreciated the most participating in this workshop was that we got to spend some time with students from other groups within the tracks course, but also with the teachers involved. It is always nice getting new perspectives from persons outside your project, with other competencies than represented within your group. As I believe we can learn a lot from interacting with other project groups, elements like this would be amazing to include more often!
Reporting by Frida Edstam
