HEY MAN CHECK ME OUT

This is taken from the Design for Motion and Sound wiki. But I wrote it so yeah.

Mid-Semester (or so) Reflections

by Christopher Field

And so we find ourselves at the halfway point in the semester, if not a little bit past it. The use of the collective “we” seems appropriate when talking about Design for Motion and Sound, the first half of the semester having been spent working in groups. At the start of the semester I was skeptical of group work. I had what could probably be considered a “poor experience” in undergrad working in a group, in what was in my mind The Worst Class Ever (aka International Studies, which I had to take due to liberal liberal (sic) arts general requirements) the result of this group work being me being called into the Instructor’s office and having to endure something that was halfway between an intervention and a flat-out tattle-tale-ing sesh, only I had done nothing wrong but had no recourse but to sit there and listen to three just not very smart girls inexplicably make stuff up about what I hadn’t done. It remains one of the many low-lights of my college experience.

But so anyway I was hesitant to get back into academic group work after something like a nine year abstention.

The best thing about group work is when you’re on the same page as everyone in your group and thus the group is able to function as something that is greater than the sum of its parts. It makes the frustrating bits of group work (the coordination of meetings, the anxiety over meetings, the meetings) more tolerable. When our group was finally able to get on the same wavelength and function as a collective, it was entirely worthwhile. And the critiques went a lot faster.

Some students (I’m not naming names) in the class have expressed a desire to continue to work on the DIC (I don’t have to explain what those letters stand for) project and to possibly make their conceptual prototypes into, well, functional things. I understand where they’re coming from on some level; having things built would be better than not having things built. It is better to exist than to not exist, thus God exists, etc. But I have next to zero interest in building the NoirScape 4REAL. I’m just ready to work on something new.

This raises an interesting question about the work in our program in general; is it better to have work that actually functions, but is conceptually limited, or to have work that is conceptually advanced but limited in functionality? Obviously one would say they would ideally like something that is conceptually advanced AND functional, but that’s not particularly feasible, for a few reasons. At this point (second semester of four), none of the students in my class have programming skills advanced enough to rapidly prototype projects fast enough to have them done within the time frame of the assignment. So we sort of end up developing them conceptually and then people kind of complain about them not being functional. It’s a hard thing to reconcile. One could continue to work on projects on their own personal non-DMI time, but that cuts into time that could be spent doing things like watching season two of Breaking Bad on DVD.