Designosaurs
Reflecting on Weeks 3 and 4 of SDC.
Jan 2025 | Dartmouth College
Team
Skills
Deliverables
Timeline
The beginning of this major group project unfolded with considerable ambiguities about our direction, and tension from clashing communication styles—but we still resolve to stay on track.
BACKGROUND
I can barely believe it’s been nearly three weeks since we began working in our main teams. The pivot from a weeklong sprint to the beginnings of a two-term project nearly twenty times as long was intense at first, especially with three formidable deliverables—team contract, research plan, and desk research presentation due within a week of our team’s conception. My team dynamic is astronomically different from that of the mini-project: two other people tend to take charge when we falter or have an unclear direction. Though the newfound rigidity and, at times in my opinion, hypercommunication that has taken hold in my new team was something to get used to, I think it’s helping me become more accountable in ways that I previously got away with overlooking. For instance, I’m now more compelled to complete my assigned SDC work well ahead of time (so it can be organized by another team member well before the deadline). My teammates have gotten me to make sure I first voice my comments on someone's notes, however granular, before I consider editing or deleting them (this has its limitations).
PROBLEM
AND FOR NOW
RESOLUTION?
Fuzzy direction + a rapid switch from structured to relatively unstructured time in this class is giving me anxiety.
Our subject matter expert interviews are starting off strong, but we haven't begun speaking with parents, students or even teachers yet—which is a bit of an issue considering parents are our target user. Our partner H has hesitated to let us speak with parents right away, and up to now has given us a single parent contact. The other members of my team thought that because our Week 5 is peppered with interviews already, that we could hold off on reaching out to her until Monday. Which I think is valid—maybe my anxiety is prematurely extending out to bother me relatively early (1/4 of the way through?) in our project.
As someone who tends to cut it close to deadlines, I was at first thrown off by two of my new teammates' solid track record of submitting things a day or two in advance. This created some tension the night before our desk research presentation, when I had some content I wanted to add into my portion of the slides right before 10 pm (slides were due at midnight) but I was turned down because by this point in the evening, all the slide information needed to be finalized so one of our group members could arrange it all.
That person ended up deleting a conceptual slide I had added and thought was important to have towards the beginning of our presentation, justifying this choice by saying that they broke up the content later on in the deck and that this approach would be more clear. Later in our class feedback, we got several comments from people who wanted certain core concepts of our project to be explained and compared at the beginning of the presentation—exactly the purpose of my now-deleted slide!
This is where I struggled, because I could have chosen to call out my teammate for deleting a slide without letting me know (something we were not supposed to do based on our team contract, as part of a rule they themselves had come up with). I ended up deciding not to confront this person, taking note of our 3/3 grade and not wanting to mess with something that had already taken place. But it's not all that ends well; we have many more slide decks to go through and many more team discussions left. I think I will need to hold myself more accountable in the future to have my designated slide content ready and organized much earlier on so I am prepared to defend them/talk through the arrangement process with that teammate, so I could have more agency as a group member while also being sure to respect my teammates' needs and collaborative process. But I'm still not sure, AITA for getting frustrated over this incident but deciding not to say anything about it until the feelings dissipated?
Since then, I've followed up by having my share of work done earlier so I am more prepared to talk about overall structure of the deliverable, whether that's a user interview script or an outreach plan. As Client Communicator for these past two weeks, I created an outreach tracker on Google Sheets to simplify assigning teammates to interviews and to help keep track of who has and hasn't been interviewed, who prefers to be emailed a list of questions, etc. And I want to be more comfortable with calling my teammates out, just as they call me out, and respectfully of course—I don't want anything more serious to fester, but it's so much easier said in this reflection than done in real life.
Looking forward as we compile our notes and transcripts, I think we are going to need a decisive meeting to figure out the best way for us to synthesize our interview content. My team enjoyed the generative AI features of my FigJam tutorial, so there's potential in FigJam, or we could revert to Mural—we are currently unsure. Since everyone is on the mend from various illnesses, we'll have to see where Week 5 takes us.
A final thought is that honestly, this class is an exercise in ambiguity. The extent of each role, the project direction/partner expectations are much more open-ended than I am used to in a UI/UX context, where I would comfortably putt around in Figma or go through the familiar process of product-specific user interviews or usability testing. The uncertainty is a bit scary right now, so I find this reflection helpful for keeping a finger on the pulse of this multiple term yet fast-paced and pretty unpredictable project.
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© 2025, Emily Chang