Reflection
Using the framework at the beginning was more of a hindrance than anything. It made the overall project seem more intricate than we needed to focus on at such an early stage. In that it made us feel the need to take more into consideration, making the freedom of brainstorming become more restricted, lowering the amount of idea branches we could have applied. however, saying that, it did mean that we were more realistic in terms of what we can and cannot do in this project. For example, we realized early on the amount of information we would need to give the potential students, so we figured that whatever path we did take, it would have to entail all of those activities.
This helped in the later stages, understanding exactly who we would be catering for allowed us to be more fine tuned in what we could do. But the ideas we arrived at in the initial phases were very vague and undefined. As can be expected of initial ideas, but the flood of required information; how many attending, required information etc. Made it hard to come to any uninformed ideas, at least, any ideas we felt would stick, or were manageable within the constraints of the sheer amount of things we would be required to know. All we were told in the beginning was that we would need to find an entertaining way to teach the students about the university, and although that is still the overbearing goal of our project, the vagueness of the outline made constructing an idea network difficult, as the required information was not available
The part about defining a theme was semi-redundant. At the point in which we were suggested to define a theme in which our project would follow, we had already sort of figured upon a thematic choice. The problem with forcing a thematic choice was that we still had a minimal amount of information to work with. We had somewhat made that choice mostly because it was the first and best method of allowing participants to find out the information on their own, but still making the challenge interest them. Another concern was that there was really no way of knowing what sort of final output we would end up using, and restricting our to a theme when the format has not been finalized, to me, seems like a counter-creative progression, essentially pigeon-holing what we can make our project into. It's understood that we don't necessarily have to follow our theme ideas, but if we don't need to follow a thematic idea, why bother having us decide on a theme?
A better idea would have been to give us the primary information we would need at the beginning first. How many, what they need to know, then allow for the group to go wild with the initial ideas, allowing them to branch out with various different ideas before setting the framework to refine and narrow the project output in a smooth and clear fashion. Not that the existing way was wrong, or bad, it just was different to how I personally would work in a project, and, to me, it was made more complicated by the way we went about designing it. With the need to know information before we could start to think freely. But then, these differences are also teaching me different ways to work, which is progress in itself.
This helped in the later stages, understanding exactly who we would be catering for allowed us to be more fine tuned in what we could do. But the ideas we arrived at in the initial phases were very vague and undefined. As can be expected of initial ideas, but the flood of required information; how many attending, required information etc. Made it hard to come to any uninformed ideas, at least, any ideas we felt would stick, or were manageable within the constraints of the sheer amount of things we would be required to know. All we were told in the beginning was that we would need to find an entertaining way to teach the students about the university, and although that is still the overbearing goal of our project, the vagueness of the outline made constructing an idea network difficult, as the required information was not available
The part about defining a theme was semi-redundant. At the point in which we were suggested to define a theme in which our project would follow, we had already sort of figured upon a thematic choice. The problem with forcing a thematic choice was that we still had a minimal amount of information to work with. We had somewhat made that choice mostly because it was the first and best method of allowing participants to find out the information on their own, but still making the challenge interest them. Another concern was that there was really no way of knowing what sort of final output we would end up using, and restricting our to a theme when the format has not been finalized, to me, seems like a counter-creative progression, essentially pigeon-holing what we can make our project into. It's understood that we don't necessarily have to follow our theme ideas, but if we don't need to follow a thematic idea, why bother having us decide on a theme?
A better idea would have been to give us the primary information we would need at the beginning first. How many, what they need to know, then allow for the group to go wild with the initial ideas, allowing them to branch out with various different ideas before setting the framework to refine and narrow the project output in a smooth and clear fashion. Not that the existing way was wrong, or bad, it just was different to how I personally would work in a project, and, to me, it was made more complicated by the way we went about designing it. With the need to know information before we could start to think freely. But then, these differences are also teaching me different ways to work, which is progress in itself.
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