Planning

In the professional world it is vital to organise your time and money in order to satisfy clients as well as turn a profit. In order to get a job completed by a deadline, we must first plan how we will spend our time based on the requirements of the brief. Provided that you have been in the industry long enough, it should be possible to easily allot time for certain tasks based on past experience. At this point it is also important to take the client’s budget into consideration with how much time you can afford to spend on each stage of the project and whether or not one stage costs more than another.

In terms of visually organising your time, charts are a great means to do it! There are programs available which are dedicated to producing time organisation charts such as Gantt charts that help to address how certain parts of the project are linked and whether or not one part needs to be completed for another to begin. While you are working through your planned project it helps to have some idea how much progress you have made compared to how much is left to do and how little time is left. Perhaps the best means of doing this is setting goals or milestones which give you a shorter time frame to work in and help to break up tasks. It is also easy to forget what is still left to do so regular audits assist you in deciding when to well and truly panic.

Unfortunately our group has not been planning our work within a long term time frame and instead, have been going on a week by week basis. On one hand this method doesn’t warrant any disappointment since there have been no set milestones. However with the lack of milestones we also have little idea of how much we have done compared to how much is still left to do. This week our group performed an audit off the top of our heads of what we still need to work on for the following weeks. We managed to come up with a decent sized list which seemed to shock us all but gave us direction and renewed vigour! I do believe that when we put our model together in week 13 that we will have a lot of unpleasant surprises in things which are yet to be completed.

Context

Context is generally used to describe the circumstances under which an object, notion or text was created[1]. It can also be described as the background information as it can explain the reasoning behind certain things. There are several types of context which we tend to use when we analyse context:

• Social – trends and the like.
• Political – Who was in power and where? What values did they promote?
• Historical – What was happening around the world?
• Personal – General upbringing and experiences.
• Geographical, especially when dealing with buildings.

While most texts, buildings and the like can be taken for their face value, we obtain a far clearer understanding from looking at the contexts under which it was created. A great example of context is the Lord of The Rings trilogy which seems like any other fantasy story. However when you look at what was going on in the world when it was written, new concepts emerge! These books were written during a time of global upheaval, around the same period as the Second World War. After seeing this it is possible to draw parallels between Hitler’s advances across Europe and Sauron and the orc hordes ravaging middle earth. Also when looking at Tolkien’s personal context we see further links as he fought in the First World War and knew the horror of the trenches.[2]

Our group is modelling an unbuilt design which has a very real site and a real architect. In order to accurately follow the architect’s intentions and give a realistic feel to the map, we need to study the site to give the right sort of feel. The Dam Theatre itself relies heavily on its context as it connects to the dam wall itself and not to the ground in any way. However the drawings and images we are working off do not resolve how the building and supporting trusses are actually attached to the wall. In order to fabricate a footing system which at least appears to work as well as similar in style to the theatre, I will be looking at the architect’s previous works to see if he has a particular method or material he uses in all or some of his designs.

Since the site is in a different continent, we will be primarily looking to the internet for images of the dam and surrounds on sites such as flickr.com as well as Google Maps to see the overall forms of the terrain.

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[1] Macquarie Concise Dictionary, The Macquarie Library, 1998

[2] http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences.html

Conflict

Conflict occurs when there is a collision of contradictory or incompatible notions which cannot co-exist. When a conflict does rear its ugly head, a resolution should be sought in a manner which retains as much of the opposing ideas without creating issues. This usually means both entities making concessions in order to achieve a solution. In an extreme case, this can mean one of the ideas being discarded in order for any resolution to occur.

In a real practicing environment, conflict can be very expensive and possibly bankrupting. Conflict from inadequate remuneration is a frequent situation. Depending on how much money is at stake and how large the companies are will determine how long the conflict will last!

As anticipated, our group has had quite a few conflicts ranging from reading the drawings we used to construct the model to more personal matters such as agendas and time tables.

Our first conflict was simply finding a suitable time and day to meet which we argued over for about a week when we came to the realisation that we would all have to make concessions of coming in on a day off, staying later or coming in earlier.

The drawings which we found for our unbuilt building were limited which meant that we were unable to clearly interpret the details of the design. The 2 sections which we found had discrepancies which conflicted with our understanding of the space. After talking about the design as a group, our combined architectural knowledge thrashed out our idea of how the space might work and justified it with the fact that this is also a fabrication exercise.

Our group has also had some personal conflicts involving differing priorities between student classes as well as difference in intents. The difference in class priorities has served in creating frustrations in some members of the group since those who prioritised our group over another engagement made key decisions in splitting up the tasks for the next couple of weeks.

There is also a conflict of attitude in the group with some members volunteering for more work whilst others doing the minimal efforts being made by others. This is frustrating for those of us who want to do the best we can for this visualisation. In order to have resolution, a full effort must be seen by all!