Collaboration and Cooperation

This morning we had a contextual session about working together to create something. We were told to think about the words collaboration and cooperation. We had to think about the meanings and slight differences between the two. We went through examples including fashion shows; where everyone has to come together including models, designers, and stylists, set designers and so on. Another example is the design firm Pentagram, this is a firm which has 19 leaders (all with their own artistic style and field), these leaders and teams work on their own projects. The teams all share a base as well as profit, resources and studio space but when it comes to a major project or commission, they all help out one another so that it’s a joint, collaborative project.

As a follow up task to this, we had to work in small groups of 3 or 4 to take at least one image based around a briefing from an exemplar company who ‘needed’ some shots for their website. We were not given many details about the company just that the advertisement had to portray any of the words from the list below:

• Fun

• Quirky

• Creative

• Togetherness

• Sharing

• Adventurous

We had to come up with a plan by mind mapping ideas of what sort of things we could include for each word and then come to a final decision of a word with some sort of idea for a shot. My group ended up choosing the word ‘togetherness’ and we were going to portray this by taking a picture of two hand joining. As well as trying to portray togetherness, we wanted to incorporate a few of the other words from the briefing list. We wanted to make the photo creative so we went to a park to so we could have a nice bright background. We used depth of field to make the photo creative and quirky.

I think our end photo portrayed at least 2 of the words from the list quite well as it clearly shows togetherness and it's quite a creative photo also.