This is Jessica Childress, and here is my story of Project One.
Our first Charettes project was about defining the Self and the Other. (Fitting, since this class segment is called Charettes: Self and Other Voices.) We had index cards with words in them, describing how we are NOT like our teacher. The project was to come up with a design that showed how we ARE like our teacher.
My group consisted of four people, myself (Jess), Nicole, Brandi, and James. Nicole texted us her idea for the design, and we all agreed that it was the best option. Her idea was to have a skull made of index cards. The top of the skull would be split open, symbolizing open-mindedness. The colored ribbons we were given would be coming out of the open skull, to connect to the ways we are similar. More ribbon would come out of the mouth, and it would connect to ways we were different.
We met up on Labor Day at my dorm to work on the project. We settled in to work, taping the index cards together and coming up with ideas for how we were similar. We thought we'd lost our 'differences' cards, so I spent a good chunk of time thinking of ways were different again. It turns out that we hadn't lost them, only forgotten where they'd been put! Thank goodness! Nicole drew and cut out the skull, and then Brandi wrote our 'similarities' on the cards inside the skull. James helped me think of the differences cards again. Nicole also did all of the documenting, taking pictures and video.
After a few hours, we had everything mostly done. We reasoned that the ribbons would just go on during the final presentation.
Cut to class on Wednesday, and we find out that we have to connect our design to everyone else's!
Clearly, some emergency thinking was needed. We decided to have my ribbon (turquoise) connect
our design to our 'differences' note cards, because we all have ways in which we are different from
each other (also, my ribbon was too short to do anything else!). The rest of the ribbon would be divided, with half coming out of the top and half coming out of the mouth. Two ribbons, one from the head and one from the mouth, would each connect to the other three groups. The head-ribbon would connect to similarities both our groups had, and the mouth-ribbon would connect to the differences.
Well, we did that, and the result was pretty nifty. We'd arranged our 'differences' cards outside the skull, because 'different' means 'other', and 'other' exists outside of us. Our critique went over pretty well.
Now to answer some of the questions on the assignment sheet! These are ones I don't think I touched on in the post above.
My understanding of this project was that we were to examine what marked us as being 'not Kidist' and what, in ourselves, was 'like Kidist'. I believe the point of this project was to help us see that, while there may be things about us that are different, there are things that bind us all together as well.
We solved this by having our design be one thing that all humans have: a skull. All the things that make us similar, such as having bones, breathing, etc., were listed inside the skull. I suggested having all of the ribbons braid together, after going and touching the differences, and ending at a card that read 'HUMAN'. However, that was not possible due to having to connect all the designs. We were going to have each ribbon only represent one person, and to lead to cards that we individually identified with. Instead, we had the ribbons connect to the other groups represent us as a whole.
My analysis of this project is that it was somewhat difficult. It's very hard to kind of get into what makes us individually different and similar. Once we had that done, though, the rest of our ideas just fell into place. After we got the basic design and 'differences/similarities' cards, other design elements just seemed obvious.
I must admit, there was not a lot of communication between groups. Everyone was up in each other's way, and talking over each other. Communication is definitely something we have to work on.
I think this project did help me with the notion of 'self and other voices'. I had to examine my 'self' to see in what ways it connected to the 'other'. This project really helped with that, and now I ink it's just a little bit easier to connect to other people.
This is Jessica Childress, signing off.
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