The workshop for week two had quite a few interesting things in store for me. If you haven’t seen my previous post, I showcased my final ‘creative self-portrait’ with all the components of each medium. In this weeks workshop, we had to present it – but in an unorthodox way. Instead of presenting to the entire class, we split-off into small groups. Within each group, every person would take turns presenting their work.
The listeners of the group would then have to provide their feedback to the presenter, so that they could better evaluate their work. But this is where it became ‘unorthodox’. Instead of each person saying what they really thought about the work presented to them, each person represented a ‘hat’ from the ‘six thinking hat’ system. If you aren’t familiar with this system – simply put, it’s a tool used for group discussions that help to give feedback from multiple perspectives. Each hat represented a different perspective. We used four out of the six hats, which goes as follows:
Red hat – represented gut feelings/initial reactions
Green hat – new ideas/thinking outside of the box
Yellow hat – positive/optimistic mindset
Black hat – negative/realistic mindset
At first glance, the sound of this system seemed full-proof. If the presenter received feedback from multiple points-of-view, they could build upon that information, and use it to improve upon themselves and do a better job next time. However, one problem I found with this system is that it’s not a natural way of giving feedback. Let me explain. I was given the ‘yellow hat’. And to be honest, I don’t like forcing myself to dig deeper to find something good about the work I’m giving feedback to. I think it would do both parties a favour, if we just tried to avoid being politically correct, and just gave the honest truth. Sometimes you need that constructive criticism in order to better improve yourself in the future. So in the end, my group just ended up ditching the whole ‘six thinking hat’ system, and just shared our own thoughts and ideas with one another. I think if we have to use the hat system again sometime in the future, I think everyone should assume the role of the same hat. Once all feedback is given from the perspective of one hat, we move on to the next, and so on and so forth.
In the second half of the workshop, we were given a task to create a haiku represented by video. If you don’t know what a haiku is, it’s simply a seventeen-syllable poem, divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables. I had trouble relating my footage to the haikus supplied to us, and thus, I created my own haiku. The finished product can be found at the bottom of this post. It was quite a simple task, so the finished product isn’t anything flashy or good by any means. Nonetheless – enjoy!