Students' interviews at the center of the exhibitions

After the last workshop at HfG, in November 2022, we met to decide on the next steps of our collaborative work.

At this stage, despite the involvement of our students in all stages of the project, we had not yet documented their feedback and personal reflections on our working subjects. In addition, we didn't feel that the output from the workshops and the work carried out during the courses were sufficient to capture what's at stake in the collaborations, considered as processes that are always in-progress.

Indeed, while the students' productions provide food for thought and formulate proposals concerning collaborative creative tools, we feel that their feedback on our international collaboration and what it generated in terms of questioning tools, positioning practices and the cohabitation of different ways of working, express more explicitly what is at stake in collaborations, through and beyond the technical devices on which they are based on. It seems to us, therefore, that if the students' productions are to be presented at the exhibition, they must necessarily be accompanied by a reflexive form, enabling us to enter into the collaboration itself, beyond the productions that have resulted from it.

To do this, we chose to interview the students. These interviews took the form of videos, an easy-to-exchange format. We decided to ask the students to answer in the language with which they felt most comfortable, and to subtitle them in English and French. We -- teachers from the three schools -- collaboratively wrote a series of questions that we felt were representative of all the topics covered over two years:

• What are the most interesting aspects of this cooperation between three countries?
• What was your biggest surprise during this trip?
• Can you describe the best and/or the worst moments during this workshop or any workshop?
• What was the main insight on collaboration during this workshop?
• Do you have an anecdote of something you experienced during the project that stuck in your mind?
• Was there any remarkable input of one of the project partners or international team members for you?
• What does collaboration mean to you? How can it succeed in the digital space?
• What have you learned about digital collaboration during this project?
• How can we enhance creativity in the digital space? Share your insights.
• What did you learn from the other partner schools and their approach to design?
• Please describe the communication with your international team-mates, how was it for you?
• Was the outcome of the workshop week different from the usual school projects that you are doing at home?
• What did you learn or observe in this project that you will take away for your professional or personal life?
• What's next for collaborative creativity?
• What would you do to deliberately screw up a collaboration project?
• What would you do to save a messy collaboration situation?
• What would you bring from digital collaboration into real life?
• Can digital collaboration ever be intimate?
• What is the point of collaborating with someone who works very differently from you?
• Were you able to combine different working methods in your group or did one method take over?
• What is interesting about collaborating with someone who works very differently?
• What would you bring from digital collaboration into real life?
• Do you think tutors in the project should have taken the very different study cultures more into account?
• We know that digital spaces may build barriers between people. Where do they offer chances?
• Do you think you learned anything during the pandemic to design for that question?
• Is there anything we can do to improve the quality of the creative process in the digital space?
• How does it work to get to know someone new in the digital space?

We then submitted them to the students, who each selected three questions and responded to them on camera. To ensure consistency between our materials, filmed in three different locations, we defined common rules for filming, lighting and temporality. We produced a total of 22 videos, which will be broadcasted in each exhibition.

Here is a list of reflections from student interviews that we have tried to summarize and compile here, they are sometimes intriguing even contradictory and can occasionally seem out of context, but are always rich in learning:

• Workshops are propitious moments to get out of your comfort zone.
• Students had to reevaluate their way of thinking and working in order to collaborate.
• During workshops, a lot of ideas popped up in a very short time.
• Reaching a group cohesion can be tough.
• Students within a team really wanted to work on the same subject but from very different point of views which were difficult to bring together.
• Different working methods sometimes are incompatible.
• It's difficult to get a tangible project by the end of the week.
• The project led to a new understanding of the distinct design methodologies by students.
• They felt like those collaborations were an insight of what they could experience later on in a professional setting.
• It's essential to work with people who have a different way of working in order to learn from each other. Moreover, if different perspectives manage to converge, the project is bound to be richer.
• There will be a bright future for creative collaboration.
• Collaboration is a question of trust.
• The project allowed most students to gain a lot of self-confidence.
• They learned a lot about methods.
• Methods and tools are not neutral and shape our way of thinking and our way of working.
• We cannot separate the tools and methods.
• Collaboration is not an end in itself.
• The communication can be natural: "each of us proposed ideas, as a ping pong game".
• Sometimes it is difficult to make decisions intuitively when you are used to follow a certain process.
• "Listening to my gut feeling again from time to time".
• Since there was a language barrier, students adjusted a lot through sketches.
• If you visualize something, you can come to a common understanding much better.
• In the digital space, the whole environment can be customized.
• Good transparency in the process is a major issue.
• Digital collaboration is not going to be something very intimate.
• Digital collaboration is always intimate to some extent: "We've all seen someone's cat run across the screen".
• It's difficult to take remote relations from a business level to a personal level or even to another level.
• The emotions disappear quickly in video-calls.
• Misunderstandings have a snowball effect and become bigger when collaborating at a distance, because it's harder to communicate clearly.
• Remote communication is the same as in real-life, just more complex.
• Varying feelings and emotions can be used successfully in group work.
• A computer is just a combination of ones and zeros, there is a risk of "over-humanizing" it.

This stage of the project, which involved gathering feedback from the students, on camera but also in front of us teachers, turned out to be a moment of reversed or reflexive pedagogy. The students, by asking themselves and telling us with a critical and constructive approach, what they've learned, and what they've appreciated or regretted, gave us valuable feedback on their experience, but also on the limits of what we have proposed during these two years of collective work.