I can’t say that I have worked on a collaborative project as of yet in my internship. I believe this is due to the structure the company I am interning at has. I am not involved in their team meetings and mostly I am given the assignment to help with a project through my supervisor. Often these projects are wireframes, then I hand them off to my supervisor and he shows them to his team and determines if it is suitable to show to the client. Usually, this is for feedback purposes. We have not determined a final design for any of the projects I am currently working on. This means that we have not handed off anything I have conceptualized or designed to be coded by the front-end or back-end designers. I have been doing wireframes and some animation for the web on the side.
I would say the only project I am working on that could count as somewhat collaborative is a project I can’t talk about due to client confidentiality. I can’t talk about the specifics, but I can talk about the design process. First I allowed free reign over how I would approach the user interface design. My supervisor wanted to see how tuned my design thinking and process are. After that, he presented it to his teams and they presented that to the client. Since I was not in the team or client meeting, I was given a meeting breakdown in an email after. I was given suggestions and feedback from my supervisor and used this, and the meeting notes, as a frame of reference to inform my redesigns. This is an ongoing project and I was told that it would take about a year to get the design finalized and coded. From my understanding, archiving is not a part of this time frame.
I do not think this method of teamwork is effective. I often find myself confused or unsure due to only being able to be in touch with the supervisor. I would like to be able to communicate with the team directly and hear their feedback as I work on projects. I feel like I am wasting time when it comes to how I am revising my designs since I can’t show them to them on slack to get their feedback before these redesigns are presented to them or to the client.
