Student-Driven campus design
Project Description
The 'Student-Driven Campus Design', a project in which students (freshmen) from the Animas community proposed an Elevator Pitch for the new and improved Animas High School. Grouped with a variety of peers ranged from Drivers to Analytical's, as a team, students worked through stages of gathering knowledge and resourceful data of how we'd like to envision our school. We were given the task to blueprint an overall campus design, and a choice of designing/creating a room we'd like to incorporate, including a written proposal, budget, project renderings, and overview.
Take Aways & Enduring Understandings
For my teams project, we did as we were told and created a campus design as best we could, and our very own unique idea of ours - an outdoor classroom. For one of our liabilities regarding our group contract we had signed at the start of this project, distributing fair workloads was highly enforced. I, myself felt I did well for that as I took on the task of creating the campus blueprints, both 2D and 3D, primarily using sketchup only. To be honest, I knew nothing about sketchup or anything of the existence, meaning that everything I had done was new to me. Throughout this process, I learned the basics of entering the exact measurements, rather than trying to do it by hand, which proved to be difficult, and professionally prototyping our design. With a large variety of tools, I only used the measurements, rectangular boxes, and tags to label rooms and measurements of each room. I did not however use photoshop, mainly because that is not a system I'm good at.
Group WOrk Reflection
Overall, this entire project hadn't quite interested me, but I did learn a lot more than what I intended to. From the issues between my team members and project itself, I had to really adjust myself to working in an environment I was not comfortable in. For me, there were about four main issues for me; communication, control, participation, and cooperation. As for cooperation, I am a very assertive and aggressive driver, and being in a group with another driver proved to be difficult, and I had to reassess myself as a team member, since I was more used to working alone. Now communicating with my peers never has been a problem, but when I feel tension and frustration, I lose the skill of connection to others and really tend to distance myself. I changed this by taking a few minutes off to cool down, and then come back with a more clear and sensible conscious. As I said before, I'm assertive, and often blunt, which isn't something I feel is good in a group environment. For another issue, control and participation actually tie in together, for example, I had brought up for my group to include a gym, and was immediately shot down, not really given a thought. I straight off the bat did not want to cooperate or give help to a task we needed to do, as I felt like my opinion and idea didn't receive a comment, or critique/reason as to why there was no need for a gym. Reflecting back, I don't feel as if I changed anything about, but more just forced myself to move and get the work done anyway, and worry about the relationships between myself and my team members later, as I saw no reason to really care in a sense.
Relevance & Personal Growth
For this entire project, giving students the free will to really advocate the needs and incorporate them into the school design was both a positive and negative. Having a strong voice to express the necessities for school means well, but has its flaws. I advocate quite well, and try my best to sought out the reasonings and opinions of others to think an idea through, whereas from what I've seen from a few others, use their voice to project their own 'selfish' vision of what only they want. I can say from experience also, a strong voice doesn't always lead the group, hence my idea of a gym. I do feel however, that given the chance to really express our wants for the new schools inner and outer exterior is fair, given that students are the ones using the environment for however long they attend. I don't think it is important though, because I'd honestly rather be more involved with the community, rather than the design and outlook.
This was a good experience, despite the negatives I may reflect on. Working with others and participating in a project I may not agree with has really driven me, and gave me the opportunity to grow as a person, and team member. I feel as though I will be more prepared for a project as similar as this.