Fresh Start

Summer is over (even September is over) and I started my first year at Chelsea College of Arts on the GDC course. First week was pretty busy with meeting new tutors and peers, listening to tons of presentations and trying to figure out the locations of the studios.

On Friday we’ve been talked through the first unit and given a small task to do on the weekends. Basically, we were divided in groups of 8 and each group got to expand one of the unit points (collaborative working practises). Then we were divided into a smaller groups and were asked to write a mission statement based on the strongest phrase from our previous brainstorm (seeing what others see/variety of opinions).

I like the phrase that was given to us very much, as in my opinion, it has an important idea under itself. Firstly, I decided to brainstorm a little bit more and think about why is it really vital to communicate to other people through your studies. At first sight, graphic designer may seem to be the kind of job that mostly involves individual work, but in real world it isn’t. You can’t become a good GD, just by sitting at home and doing your projects. Well, you can actually, but it wouldn’t last for long, unless you go out and start talking with people, looking what they do and how they do it. In terms of that, college is a great place to be, as it is always full of people with whom you can discuss, share, explore and collaborate.

I wasn’t familiar to the “mission statement” term until that, so I started out with googling it and finding out what it is. As I understood it is mainly used by big organisations to define their aims, values and reasons of their existence. However, I didn’t quite understand how long it should be and how much information it needs to provide as I’ve seen a lot of different samples (starting out with two word statements and ending with two sentence longed ones).

First statement I came out with was – to inspire & to be inspired – I think that giving and receiving is an important part of working together, in a team. If you don’t talk to people and share with them your ideas they wouldn’t have anything to give you back. I do believe that students inspire each other and that’s what makes them a community.

Secondly, I thought about the process of collaboration (working together). What are its basic steps? First of all you share and discuss, listen and suggest, that’s how you learn from each other. Then you start to explore, experiment and create, reaching new heights and doing things you’ve never thought or imagined before. That’s how I came out with this one:

See what other people see: to share, learn from each other and to create things you’ve never thought of before.

I am not sure, if I’ve done the task right or if my statement is okay, but I am really satisfied by the work I did through the weekends as it helped me to understand the unit purposes better and look at the group work from a slightly different angle.

sketchbok1

sketchbook2

#Reflection #BAGDC #graphicdesign #chelsea