Lionel M./Blog 2/Collaborative Experiences

Hello, everyone. For the sake of you readers I will keep this post nice and short. First question: why is the panel abstract important? I can only give you my personal answer; it is important because it forces everyone to commit their ideas to paper. In the flurry of brainstorming, many ideas get thrown out into the air and they remain in the air like a cloud. Like a cloud, the ideas are formless and intangible, that is, they are in a state where their lack of structure and concreteness makes them hard to work with. This is especially relevant in the sort of interdisciplinary task that faces us, since some of the ideas of our respective disciplines are not particularly amenable to cohesion. The act of collaboratively creating an abstract, however, forces those ideas into the shape of definite words and since those words must be gathered together into a coherent paragraph, it forces one to make the words fit and thereby making the ideas fit. This is closely related to the second question: how do I describe the process of mapping both the parallels and points of departure between my group members' respective solo projects? I describe that process as I have above; it is putting pen to paper in order to make those parallels and points of departure apparent and obvious where before they were muddled or hidden. Yes, it was challenging, and yes, it was rewarding, but above all it was necessary.