The Smartsurface Conundrum

I think that our discussion with Michelle Addington made for one of the best discussions of my senior year. In part, I think that this is because the discussion exposed many broader implications about collaboration and the nature of progress that are extremely relevant us as students right now, as we are all bound for “real world” employment next year and must integrate ourselves into a company consisting of people educated in various disciplines.

I think that the most interesting aspect to the discussion was the exposure of the conundrum of this Smartsurfaces class, which is the troubling relationship between the ‘subject matter’ of this class and its ‘educational content’. I would broadly classify the subject matter of this class as heliotropism. I think that the ‘educational content’ of this class is inter-disciplinary collaboration, or rather the actual process of collaboration that takes place in each group’s quest to conceptualize the final project and bring it to fruition.

Of course, as we have all discovered in our group projects, these two variables combine to make for a roller coaster of excitement, progress, creativity, and frustration.

So, in one respect we (the students) have the impression that the criteria for judging the project’s success lies in the impressiveness of our end product, however, I think that the real criteria for judging success might actually lie in how we came to improve our collaborative approach throughout the project.

In short I would almost be more comfortable with struggling and perhaps failing to produce the “product” if I am able to come to terms with the difficulties of interdisciplinary collaboration. In this regard I personally feel that the most valuable “product” of this class is not the impressiveness and installation of our concept and project, but the gained ability to interact with others to create pertinent concepts and bring them to fruition.

Interestingly, the criteria by which people outside of this class will judge its success and value (including those university officials responsible for funding the future of the class) will be the impressiveness of end product and the impact that our projects will make on them within the gallery installation, and not the more valuable aspect of each project which is the process by which we interacted to actually create them.