2/21 Activity Reflection

Conversations about chairs

Michael:

In this small group activity, we split into breakout room groups of four and took turns filling 4 different spots:

• 1. Discussing what we are currently comfortable with in our lives and work, and then discussing what we wish to improve upon
• 2. Responding with the emotion felt from the first person’s thoughts
• 3. Restating what is heard from the first person from an analytical standpoint (pointing out the facts)
• 4. Rating on a 1–10 the first individual’s motivation.

And in doing so, we were able to hear the unique perspectives of everyone from our group. Some people discussed their desires to become better at communication, become better technically in their craft, and knowing when to stop stressing so much.

Personally I found it much more difficult to talk from the third and fourth seats. Responding from an analytical standpoint was not something that I particularly like to do because it’s easy to accidentally skew up what another person is saying, and instead, I just enjoy having the person talk about themselves if available. And for rating an individual’s motivation, it’s hard to judge how motivated they are: what represents a 7? what makes that any different from an 8 or a 9? Does the inflection of their confidence or desire to learn make a better rating? I think I tried to be fair with my ratings for others giving 7+s, but it’s not clear to me what that number would really represent.

But despite everyone’s differences in desires and confidences, we felt that a common thing that each person had was the desire to continue learning and discovering something new. Whether that be wanting to be less shy with others or become better at tools used within the design process, everyone recognized in themselves they had something to work on, and was at least open enough to talk about it.

Holly:

Acting as a Speaker felt a bit awkward for me. I think that because I usually don’t discuss introspective thoughts in such a public setting, so I had trouble getting over the barrier of “letting people in”, especially peers who I wasn’t particularly close to. Where I felt frustrated, others saw remorse or guilt — that prompted some thinking for me, and after yesterday’s exercise, I think that I’m not as in-touch with my feelings as I expected.

As a Head, I felt like it was challenging to not repeat what the speaker said back at them. I also wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to extrapolate what the speaker said(not present in the moment -> spending time thinking rather than experiencing/doing).

I think in the role of Heart, there is more leeway for interpreting what the Speaker is expressing as opposed to Head. However, I had trouble assigning emotions for people I’m not super close with. Like what I said about my time as Speaker, I’m not super in touch with my emotions, which carries over to interpreting other people’s emotions. It’s easier to interpret body language and the literal meaning of someone’s words, but harder to dive deep for an activity like this. I ended up combining how the Speaker presented themself(confidence, choice of words — how they talked about their actions, and literal interpretations of their words) to try to gauge their emotions.

The role of Will was by far the most challenging role for me. Like Heart, I had a mental conflict about how to carry out this role — how do you fairly assign a numerical score to someone’s motivation? I don’t know enough about the peers I was assigned to believe that I can accurately judge their motivation. I can tell they’re trying, after all, that’s what we do as students, but I struggled with assigning a number to their perceived efforts.

Overall, I felt that this exercise was interesting but limited by how open people were willing to be with a group of peers. I’m interested in seeing how responses and how people interpret the roles change if this exercise was consistently performed over a course of time. Would people be able to go deeper if they consistently practiced it with the same group of people versus with a random group of people? I think this practice and its results could be very interesting as a long term exercise.

Max :

The four chairs exercise from Research methods was a great way to learn and think about the different perspectives from my peers. In the beginning, our group was confused about how to start the conversation but we soon got the rhythm of it. I really enjoyed how each person had an assigned role during the conversation and I soon realized this made everyone listen more closely. In a normal conversation with my peers, I would usually just listen to the content but, by taking different roles throughout the conversation, I was able to observe the speaker’s emotion and motivation which was very cool. My favorite role out of the 4 positions was the heart chair. I found this very interesting because when I’m usually with my friends, I tend to be the speaker chair most times. I always thought I was a talkative person but I realized I enjoyed spectating and listening as much as talking. Overall, the four chairs exercise was a fun way to reconnect with my peers and I learned that as a designer, I should be able to listen and take in various perspectives.

Richard:

Our initial exercise on listening from different viewpoints really opened my eyes to how our observations and insights were intertwined. I found that no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t help but filter what the speaker was saying through some lens of interpretation, whether I was actively choosing it or not. However, when given specific roles to listen for, I felt myself selectively picking up parts of their sentences as if I was building a bullet point list in my head. Some roles, like willpower or heart, were easier for me because I could focus less on the exact statements the speaker was making and instead direct my attention at interpreting the overall message or emotions being conveyed. I thought that the head role was by far the most challenging since many statements that the speaker made were in the context of their own feelings of their design practice, and it was hard to filter away the emotions that were more obvious to me. The whole experience was a great way of warming up our own observation skills and being able to analyze our thought processes from a more critical point of view.