Learning, Teaching, Connecting
I was invited to be a part of John Thackara’s jury team in the Design for Social Impact category at the Core77 Design Awards 2015. You can find details of winners here, but I also wanted to share some reflections on being part of the jury team.
I usually approach juries and judging with much trepidation, since I really disliked them during my time as a student. However, this one forced me to rethink what going through an experience, with respect, preparedness, and openness can teach you — even when you are on a jury! My team members were the always-awesome John Thackara, along with Gill Wildman and Mathilda Tham, both of whom I did not know before we met via Skype. John had given us clear and concise instructions on what we needed to do prior to our jury ‘session’ and it really helped that we all came prepared.
Much ado is made of creative chaos, but experiences and hard knocks have taught me the immense value of coming to a team session well-prepared.
The value that can be derived is just immensely worth more than the alternative. What we had at the end of it all was an extremely productive session that we finished before time (despite Skype issues and the four of us being in four different countries), and that gave us each new learnings and new friends. This made me also think of some stuff that I have been exploring recently with respect to helping set a learning agenda for each one of us at Quicksand. While we might all be completely different personalities with varied styles of working, I think that if I were to concoct a potion that makes a team click, it would surely have generous doses of the following :
And now that I think of it, if we could indeed bring all of these together magically then we could move mountains. On top of this, if I had to talk about the challenges and learnings of judging the entries themselves…well, I think I will just save that up for another day!
