Mini-Project: Disconnect?
Reflecting on my first week of class and our Senior Design Challenge practice sprint.
Jan 2025 | Dartmouth College
Team
Skills
Deliverables
Timeline
This project was an exercise in how (not) to prototype, being proactive, and maybe a sign that project management isn't in the cards for me—yet?
BACKGROUND
As a designer, I've realized that I work best in teams with mutual accountability. This means that we're not afraid to call each other or ourselves out for not delivering, even as we support each other as humans first. And up until this past week, I've mainly had the privilege of being placed in teams with proactive individuals who are eager to delegate work, follow up, and show up to get the job done. By going with the flow, doing what I was assigned, and communicating if I had any issues that would impede my work, I settled comfortably into this passive role as a contributor throughout school, part-time jobs and internships.
SURPRISE/
PROBLEM
I had my first brush with managing a project.
A combination of busy weekend schedules and lack of design practice among my teammates wound up with me unexpectedly taking on the unthinkable throughout this project: the responsibilities of a de facto project manager.
Since no one else seemed to be taking initiative the way I had learned to expect early on, I found myself shouting into the void much more often: tagging my teammates to divide up work, being the only line of comments in Mural when we were supposed to asynchronously evaluate each other's ideas, triple texting to check when everyone was free.
I found the whole process to be overwhelming. I’m much more accustomed to just doing my designated share of tasks and showing up to things rather than having to schedule and facilitate meetings, send all the reminders, and assign my teammates work. Most terrifyingly, I for the first time came closer to planning, sharing and executing a "roadmap" of the project ("roadmapping" is probably too strong of a word; my process honestly looked more like planning to get one step done during a meeting, waiting nearly 30 minutes for a teammate to show up, losing momentum, and ending up having that planned step bleed into the time originally reserved for tackling the following step. And so on until we were right down to the wire. I was out of my element; doing my best unfortunately was not cutting it.)
OPPORTUNITY
How might we ensure quality control and consistent motivation throughout a design sprint when a team lacks collective initiative?
SOLUTION
(BUT NOT THE
ONLY ONE)
Critiques are built into design for a reason
There is no iteration in design without feedback given throughout the process. We solely focused on user interviews and testing, but didn't think to ask Eugene or other designers outside our team scope what they thought of our actual process, whether things actually lined up, etc. until it was time to drop the bomb on presentation day.
No pain, no gain
Interestingly enough, none of us asked our users any explicit questions about the pain points they experience when trying to find connection. This gap repeated itself when we continued to overlook an actual problem statement. I think that had we been more intentional about uncovering user pain points in our interviews, we could have crafted stronger POVs and more targeted solutions that actually resonated with user needs. Instead, we had a very disjointed and unfocused approach that came back to bite us.
Avoidance and procrastination can only get you so far before someone calls you out!
I don't even mean this in a teamwork context (though in retrospect I should have brought up my concerns and that I was feeling overwhelmed more explicitly with my team/prof while the project was ongoing). I wish I had asked for feedback early and often so we could have a clearer idea of how to get back on track! There’s only so much you can compress a design sprint before it becomes a total wreck. And since I was assigned with creating the prototyping and testing slides and we had literally done all our testing the same day it was due, I felt like I barely had time to process our testing discussion and just procrastinated by making solution mockups and making suggestions for other slides.
A BETTER
MOMENT
Practicing
Rapid
Ideation
My favorite part of the Mini-Project was the initial phase of ideation. Rapid ideation is not my strong suit and is a skill I am trying to boost as a designer. I enjoyed challenging myself to individually churn out as many ideas as possible in a constrained timeframe, while also enjoyed the process of group brainstorming where we could bounce off of and flesh out each other’s ideas.
DARKEST
MOMENTS
The Final
Throes?
When things snowball towards the end
I definitely struggled the most in the transition from ideation into prototyping and testing. Tardiness from other team members and just going off topic ended up cutting into our ideation time and meant that we didn’t end up deciding on our 6-8 favorite ideas as a team. Since we as a team had limited overlap to finish ideating and prototyping together and even less overlap with our users for testing, I suggested we each individually read through everyone’s ideas, come up with 2-3 each, then finalize one idea each to prototype on our own before we met again. Unfortunately, this lack of collaborative alignment in our work effectively meant that each of our prototypes met disparate user needs while straying further and further away from the POVs we had established together.
I should have stayed away from this individualized approach, but thought at the time that it was going to be the most efficient course of action for a very imminent deadline. This was my first school design project since junior winter, and was also my first time essentially acting as project manager for a group project.
Towards the end, I totally burned out and ended up as the bottleneck, being the final person to finish my slides mere minutes before they were due. The others obviously weren't happy with this, and it honestly felt like the project finally blew up in my face when feedback was posted. My solution and my individualized approach to addressing the team's disjointedness made no sense outside my own narrow perspective, my presentation was lackluster when I usually pride myself for exuding excitement about a final product I helped create. My teammates and I did not openly point fingers, but I can guess what could be going through their minds. With a haphazard combination of false confidence and tunnel vision, did I lead us astray? Certainly, but I should not have been the only one picking up slack on the reins.
CARELESS
MISTAKES
But Easy Fixes
It was extra frustrating for me to have missed a crucial step in the project presentation format that has been drilled into me with every ENGS 12/21 presentation, every DALI Technigala showcase, and every portfolio project I have spent countless hours crafting into my website: presenting the problem first and foremost, inserting a HMW sampler that clues into how we approached the problem, and then finally unveiling our grand solution.
Instead, I totally overlooked the first two components and barreled straight into the solution when formatting our presentation. Several hours before we had to submit, I announced to the group chat that I was putting the solution first and was given no indication that anything was amiss. And having skimmed the Mural instructions, I had completely overlooked the Mini-Project template (and so had my team)! I have been used to my teammates keeping me in check, but this time was a different case entirely. Time to be more mindful and diligent with the basic steps and tools I'm given — the first time around.
This first week was somewhat demoralizing but only has me more determined to apply what I've learned to grow into a stronger teammate and designer. This means staying grounded in actual user needs and pain points, tackling every step as a team effort even when things get busy, and asking for guidance/feedback early and often to prevent any tunnel vision from taking over our process. Fingers crossed that my teammates match my energy. Onward and upward from here!
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© 2025, Emily Chang