Learning Outcome Two: Reflect on their practice within a context of ambiguity, uncertainty and unfamiliarity.

Working within a group of mixed abilities and with people from different backgrounds has been both challenging and exciting. My background is completely different to how we were working in this project. I am based on Textiles in Practice, and my specialism is Weave. I work flat, I look at colour pattern and texture. NOT with wood..

Our big group split into two, so there was Joel and I as the designers of the final piece for the playground.

One member of our group is from the 3D course (Joel Gabb), and so as our project is circling around building a three dimensional final piece to place in the playground of the school, unfortunately that meant that there was a lot of pressure on that member to help us to figure out how the structure could be built. I am very inexperienced in working three dimensionally, and especially with our chosen material for the project (wood). At the beginning I felt confident that I could assist Joel in working out the specifics of building said structure and with deciding on the correct tools and materials to use. I have always thought that I could visualise these kinds of things and communicate my ideas well. This proved to be MUCH much harder than I thought. I went from feeling confident, to feeling completely lost and out of my depth. Despite this, I offered as much help as I could to Joel and I actually found it very interesting visualising a three dimensional outcome as this was so different to any of my previous work as a textile weaver.

So starting off I had an idea of how I thought the structure would be built, what type of wood could be used and how it could be fixed together. This came crumbling down when I saw a technician from the wood workshop who told Joel and me that we hadn’t thought of a lot of things and it turned out that it was a lot more complicated than we thought. This was a good learning curve, and if I am every working with wood again I will know that it needs a lot more researching than I previously thought. One thing I learnt was that you can’t just use any wood for outdoor use, you have to buy wood that has been treated for external use.

Another way that I have worked out of my comfort zone is by presenting workshops to the children. My way of working is very much on my own, to myself and for myself. Working with a group and presenting workshops has been a new experience which I have proven to take well to. This has given me the confidence to embrace group work in the future as I have seen how much you can achieve when working in a group and how tasks can be approached in a completely different way than on your own. This task definitely benefitted from us all working together as a group as we have been able to share the work load and bounce ideas off each other effectively to overcome issues and to all meet the same goals.