”During this course you were challenged to work in a multi-cultural setting. You had the opportunity to work with people that have different educational backgrounds. This became especially clear in the way you approached the assignment and the way you addressed problems. Whereas the students with a design background tend to start framing and reframing the problems in terms of opportunities, others commonly start with defining requirements and finding solutions to these requirements. Sometimes this was counterproductive, but most of the time it was inspiring to see that in many cases this difference could lead to new insights. Overall, you learned a lot from this teamwork and design process.
You worked with 6 Chinese students in the design team and although you have had earlier experience working with international students, you still treat this assignment very seriously. Your approach was very much appreciated by the Chinese students and in their feedback to us they considered you as the team leader. Well done!” - Prof. Y.Lu
In the feedback given by Prof. Y. Lu is stated that the competency area of descriptive and mathematical modeling has not been developed during this assignment. However, during the design process some of my steps have contributed to the development of this area.
At some point in the design process we wanted to make a watch that would be able to ‘read’ the emotions of the wearer and send this to another watch. To solve this problem I studied the function of a mood ring and used the technology of the thermotropic liquid crystals it contains to make the watch able to read emotions.
This research and the implementation of the found information in the concept have taught me how to use research in a concept. And how to ‘sketch with information’
”As for teamwork process perspective, you learned from each other about cultural difference. You had to understand cultural awareness and you made a contribution to the teamwork. Your team suffered some communicational problems in the beginning, but when you realized the cultural awareness, you made the plan and scheduled your meeting with both Dutch and Chinese students. You made effort to facilitate the distributed communication and tried to explain the ideas clearly.” - Prof. Y.Lu
Working in this design team was more complicated then regularly, since there was a time difference of 7 hours that we had to take into account. Some meetings were missed due to communication misunderstandings. After having experienced a few problems, we decided to make a schedule and plan all of the meetings for the rest of the assignment. This worked for us, and the rest of the assignment the communication went smoothly.
The design brief for this assignment was to improve the social mobility of the Chinese elderly. In order for me to be able to make a contribution to the concept, I had to gain knowledge of the Chinese culture and background. Knowing that the Chinese students know how to communicate with the elderly of their country, they gathered information about the daily lives, values and habits of the elderly. Using this information I tried to make as good a contribution as possible.
The DG407 assignment has had a big influence on my social cultural awareness on two levels. The first level is the fact that I had to understand and use the cultural differences when designing for Chinese elderly. The second level is the teamwork with Chinese students. In my previous project I have done this as well, but the other way around. The Chinese students had to design for a Dutch background.
It was really interesting for me to see the cultural difference in communication, especially when working in a Chinese team as the only Dutch member. Chinese communication is very indirect and the Dutch ‘get-to-the-point attitude’ is often seen as offensive. I had to change my way of communicating in order to fit in the team.