Experience from the Bangalore Service jam

This is the second time I was participating in an event outside college. The first was the IAMAI hackathon.
It is a good change to meet and work with people from new territory.It helps to go outside college and learn something new and try applying it in real world scenarios.
I attended the Bangalore Service Jam last weekend. It s a global service design jam started by two designers-Adam and Markus, and this year Bangalore was the headquarters. So both the founding member were present here.

The basic concept of this is that you work as a team; join a team where you do not know anyone; and each team should have members from different backgrounds.

I was in this team of 7 member. That's a lot. And our challenge for this year was 'Grow'. My initial reaction was apprehension on learning that I have to be part of a team where I don't know anybody, forget about remembering anyone's name, I was not even sure how we could work together.

So here I was sitting with a interface designer, a marketing guy, developer, graphic designer, coder etc. As the day began, the marketing guy took lead and started discussing strategies, it made the interface designer unhappy. She could not communicate her ideas. making it worse was the fact three members of the team got disinterested early, so they started to roam around. And before you know it, our team was no longer working. I felt bad. I just wanted to enjoy designing and looking at the team condition, I decided to take lead, get the marketing guy to hold back for a while and make the disinterested members do something.

So next day, I come early and divide the work. Also I started facilitating the conversations. It was the first time I was taking lead, so I was nervous and pretty stressed out. but somehow I wanted to at least create a finish the challenge.

My job now turned from a designer to a facilitator and collaborator. I was running around, talking and making people work. Towards the end of it we managed to finish the brief the idea to the judge. Except that I chose the marketing guy to present as I felt that he is a good speaker. and before you know it, he deviates from the main concept and starts throwing his own idea to the judge. It pisses me off badly and few more members, but I decided to stay tight-lipped as cross countering our team member would throw a negative image in front of the judge.

This two day event exposed me to a bigger challenge. How do you communicate your ideas effectively?
It is not enough to just know design process. When someone works in a multi-disciplinary team with a brief to solve, you need to get the idea going. Designing is just one part of it. It also brought about the importance of rehearsing and rechecking with each team member to ensure that their role is clear and work is in the right direction.

Effective communication and team mentoring are crucial parts to the success of a design process.